About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Objectivism

A Critique of Murray Rothbard's "Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult" (Part 2 of 3)
by G. Stolyarov II

What is Humor and What is Sacrilege?

"Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul-and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle." So declares Ellsworth M. Toohey, the arch-collectivist from Rand's other literary epic, The Fountainhead. Humor within certain bounds can be employed as a means of comprehension or enjoyment. An innocent joke, a paradox, a satire sharpen an individual's reasoning ability while amplifying his rightly gained pleasure. Humor can be employed to expose the horde of fallacies, buffooneries, and hypocrisies plaguing modern society, and is thereby a potent educational tool. However, humor must not be employed to sneer at a man's self-image, at, in Rand's words, "the sacred temple of his soul," his genuine ambitions, his sense of life, and the joy that he takes in living by principle and practice. This is the difference between a laugh and a giggle. A laugh is the call of a giant, resonating with an ecstatic appreciation of his own existence. A giggle is the buzzing of a pest around the giant's head, in preparation for inserting a stinger where it hurts, the most sacred reaches of a man's mind.

Rand had always advocated a human being who is radiantly happy in his productive endeavors, and uses humor without abusing it. But what says Rothbard? In reference to the incident wherein a newlywed couple sought inspiration from the pages of Atlas Shrugged, "wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one 'is not serious about one's values.' The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one's enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be." What "sobering and sane effect," Dr. Rothbard, is derived from renouncing one's guiding principles, one's tools for living, with mocking contempt, from posing not an open intellectual challenge to another's values (assuming one disagrees with them, which, Rothbard, to an extent, does) but an underhanded, contemptuous "low blow" to any dignity and esteem? How can renunciation of all principles and all of the elevated faculties of man in favor of a giggle be considered "sane?" It is such only to a perceptually-bound mind embracing the side of the mind/body dichotomy that repudiates all consistency and integrated living.

Another instance of so-called "cultist repression" is documented by Rothbard. "Thus, one time a Randian, walking with a girl friend, told her that he had attended a party at which several Randians had made an impromptu tape imitating the voices of the top Randian leaders. Stricken by this dire information and after spending a sleepless night, the girl rushed to inform the top leadership of this terrible transgression. Promptly, the leading participants were called on the carpet by their Objectivist Psychotherapist and bitterly denounced in their 'therapy'sessions: 'After all,' said the therapist, 'you wouldn't mock God.' When the owner of the tape refused the therapist's demand to relinquish it so that it could be inspected in detail, his doom as a member of the movement was effectively sealed." What sort of lowly, vile demeanor does it take to mimic, apparently in derisive tones, the voices of those who had served as ideological guides and assistants to oneself? This is a clear instance of humor's abuse. One purportedly agrees with the ideas, upholds the reasoning, yet, in an infantile, relishingly nihilistic manner, proceeds to denounce their originators based on so circumstantial and metaphysically insignificant a quality as tone of voice! The value-judgment implicit in such a moral transgression is that no matter how insightful, how aspiring and successful a person is, it is the happenstance of his or her voice that will determine his or her worth. And, apparently, because they were mocked, Rand and her "inner circle" were not held in high esteem by the perpetrators of such an insult. With friends like these, one needs no enemies!

Revisionism and the Hatred of the Good

The historical and political views of such an avowedly right-wing advocate of laissez-faire capitalism as Rothbard can hardly be termed consistent with his titanic accomplishments in the realm of economics. Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn come to resemble patriotic champions of American unilateralism in the face of the following excerpt from Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. "Taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States... Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks adopted the theory of 'peaceful coexistence' as the basic foreign policy for a communist state..." Murray Rothbard, during the undertaking by the Viet Minh of a grievous blow to American commercial and security interests in South Asia in 1975, praised "the will and determination of the mass of Vietnamese (and Cambodians)" against which "none of America's superior might and firepower could in the end prevail." The murders of forty million "counterrevolutionaries" by Stalin, the gruesome anti-intellectual purges of the Khmer Rouge, the barbaric war crimes of the Viet Minh, all pale in comparison to the "bellicose imperialism" of the United States, contends Rothbard. By some twisted and inhuman calculus, the freest country in the history of mankind must now be blasted while some of the world's most grotesquely totalitarian tyrannies showered with laudation! And this, let the reader be reminded, originates from a self-proclaimed apostle of liberty and individualism. Such is revisionism at its worst.

What is the connection between this rabid anti-Americanism and Rothbard's criticism of the Objectivist movement? It can be discovered by some of the undertones of Rothbard's discussion of conditions in the "cult." "And so the young convert – and they were almost all young – began to buckle when he learned more about his own chosen subject. Thus, the historian, upon learning more his subject, could scarcely rest content with long outdated Burkhardtian clichés about the Renaissance, or the pap about the Founding Fathers. And if the disciple began to realize that Rand was wrong and oversimplified in his own field, it was easy for him to entertain fundamental doubts about her infallibility elsewhere." Rand's view of the Renaissance, in summation, was of an age in which the human spirit was at last liberated from millennia of stale dogmatism, and the scientific and philosophical accomplishments of Greek and Roman thinkers were extrapolated to result in a new age of dynamic prosperity. Her analysis of the Founding Fathers was of a group of men who embodied the rationality of the Enlightenment in the framework of government that they had established. Of course, to Rothbard the revisionist, the hurler of defamatory smears at the United States and at this radiant view of the Renaissance, from which the Enlightenment had sprung, and America, which had sprung from the Enlightenment, is intolerable. He likely would not dub any comment concerning these to be accurate unless it asserted that the Renaissance was an age dominated by butchery and Machiavellian machination and that George Washington was a slave-owning bigot and Thomas Jefferson a vile rapist. The fact remains: Rand's analysis of the historical evolution of Western civilization and her lucid demonstration of the relevance thereof to happenings of modernity are accurate and as specific as a philosopher needs to get (which is far beyond the scope of this essay. Suggested readings on Randian historical analysis include For the New Intellectual, The Voice of Reason, The Virtue of Selfishness, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and Philosophy: Who Needs It). The so-called young historians who took post-modern revisionism on faith and thought they had discovered a refutation to Rand's entire edifice of ideas were sorely misled into the quagmire of spiteful irrationalism.

Rothbard's revisionism is evident, although more subtly, even in the remarks he allows against Rand herself. Rothbard contends that Rand's charisma was "buttressed by her air of unshakeable arrogance and self-assurance." A pride taken in living, and a confidence in the validity of one's ideas (rightly dubbed self-assurance) has been mixed by Rothbard with term defining an unwarranted and overly elevated opinion of oneself. Concerning the aim of Objectivism, Rothbard writes that "power, not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement." Further down in the paragraph, Rothbard refers to Objectivism as a "virus" and hopes that "Libertarians, once bitten by [it], may now prove immune."

Now that the reader is aware of Rothbard's scornful deprecation of the ideology which has come closest to arguing for the validity of reason and necessity of individualism, he is likely to consider Rothbard an immensely scrutinizing thinker for whom nothing but perfection in the intellectual realm will do. If this is Rothbard's denunciation of Objectivism, it may appear, then he must be casting other frameworks of thought into the depths of intellectual Inferno! But, what does Rothbard truly say about the irrational modes of thought?

"As a political theory, Libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner of philosophic (or nonphilosophic) positions, including emotivism, hedonism, Kantian a priorism, and many others. My own position grounds Libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology and metaphysics. But although those of us taking this position believe that only it provides a satisfactory groundwork and basis for individual liberty, this is an argument within the Libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding of Libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself," writes Rothbard in Modern Age magazine. Whereas Rothbard terms Objectivists (who are closest even to his own fundamental positions) to be viral, he takes no essential issues with all those ideologies which fall into the traps Rand's had avoided, the reason/passion and mind/body splits, the empiricism/rationalism antagonism, and the delusion that the spur of the moment is the guiding force within man.

Why this, and especially from such an accomplished and insightful economic thinker? Why does Rothbard, in the macroscopic realm of global politics, assail the most free and prosperous nation in favor of the most monstrous autocrats? Why does he, similarly, in the comparatively microscopic realm of individual relations and ideological discourse, denounce the ideology that advocates liberty and accomplishment most, while pandering to the ones riddled with fallacies and the inevitable disastrous consequences thereof? There can be no rational justification for this; it is rather a fault of post-modern revisionism and its essential antecedent, nihilism, the hatred of the good for being the good. Rothbard, unlike the leftist party-liners, is not a thorough, across-the-board nihilist, but rather a man of mixed premises, a character who is willing to place rubbish on equal terms with brilliance in his intellectual arsenal. When reading his works, and especially "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult," one must take care to separate the gold from the blinding dust.

Sanctions: 5Sanctions: 5 Sanction this ArticleEditMark as your favorite article

Discuss this Article (45 messages)