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Should
“Atlas Shrug”?
A Brief Christian Response to Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Philosophy
By
Eric V. Snow
“Who is John Galt”? Well then, correspondingly, just who is Ayn
Rand? What is Objectivism? How should Christians respond to Rand’s unique
brand of atheism? By advocating
laissez-faire capitalism and by attacking altruism, she certainly poses a different
kind of threat than (say) Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam
Harris. Since the film “Atlas Shrugged
Part 1” is now hitting America’s movie theaters, it’s timely for Christians to
review some of the fundamental errors in Ayn Rand’s Objectivist
philosophy. Although her philosophy is
indeed correct in certain limited areas of epistemology, metaphysics, and
(astonishingly) even ethics, Objectivism is wrong to deny God’s existence, the
Bible as God’s revelation to mankind, and the duty for voluntary self-sacrifice
to God and the poor.
Building
upon the philosophy proclaimed in the 1943 novel “The Fountainhead” about the
career struggles and ultimate success of the architect Howard Roark, Ayn Rand,
the Russian-American philosophical novelist (1905-82), published the novel
“Atlas Shrugged” in 1957. Its basic
plot describes the worldwide and especially American economic collapse that
results from a “strike” by the productive rich businessmen and other innovators
in society. Much like the approach of
her countryman Dostoevsky in “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Atlas Shrugged” lays
out the author’s philosophical position through the characters’ actions,
dialogs, and speeches. Although it
states an overall intellectual position much more completely than “The
Fountainhead” did, it’s less successful as a novel since its characters’
development and actions are so subordinated to proclaiming a message. Despite its happy ending, the novel also has
a generally pessimistic, depressing air as it describes in such detail for so
many pages the world’s and especially America’s general economic decline and
collapse as various wrong-headed laws and regulations are implemented and more
of the productive rich and capable go on strike. Although a full review of Ayn Rand’s philosophy from an
intellectual Christian perspective would require a book that rivals the length
of “Altas Shrugged,” this essay will only hit upon a few obvious errors and
limitations in Rand’s philosophy.
However, it’s necessary to give the devil his due when he’s right: In certain areas, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is
much more correct than the skeptical, subjectivist secular philosophy that
reigns in our culture today, which is largely traceable back to the Scottish
philosopher David Hume (1711-1776).
(Corresponding to her original Russian nationality, Ayn Rand focused so
much more of her fire upon the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
than upon Hume. But in the
English-speaking world, Hume is surely more influential overall, especially
when considering that so often Kant’s philosophy took Hume’s positions as his
starting point. He’s been called the
“Prussian Hume” for good reason. Hume
also was a better writer than Kant, which surely promoted his influence among
those who can read English). It’s a
major error for Christians to try to refute atheism by attacking human reason
broadly, such as found in Dinesh D’Souza’s “What’s So Great About
Christianity.” Christianity isn’t
proven to be true by (say) tearing down the metaphysical reliability of the law
of cause and effect, as G.K. Chesterton did when attacking this foundational
law of science by using Hume’s own reasoning.
Human reason has its place, just as sex does, but we need to keep both
from jumping the tracks that mark God’s will for us, which is His law as
revealed by Scripture.
Ayn Rand’s most fundamental
error is to assume the truth of the broader skeptical culture concerning the
arguments for God’s existence and the Bible’s historical accuracy. She spends an enormous amount of effort in
attacking Christian ethics, as it proclaims the need to sacrifice ourselves to
help the weak and to serve God, and the place of suffering in serving a useful
purpose (as Christians believe) in strengthening our character. But she hardly ever felt the need to refute
the traditional proofs for God’s existence.
Apparently she knew nothing about the standard evidence for a rational
faith in the Bible as a revelation from an almighty God based upon archeological
discoveries, its historical accuracy, and fulfilled prophecies. I would publicly challenge any Objectivist
to refute in detail, page by page, even my own essay that reviews such
evidence, which is posted on the apologetics page of this Web site: http://www.lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Is
the Bible the Word of God.htm
How much do those advocating Objectivism know about such writers as C.S.
Lewis, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, Henry Morris, Duane Gish, J.P. Moreland,
Francis Schaeffer, Phillip E. Johnson, R.C. Sproul, Norman Giesler, Gleason
Archer, etc.? How much of the
Objectivist position is based upon simple raw ignorance of Christian apologetics? Could even the likes of Dr. Leonard Peikoff,
Ayn Rand’s intellectual and literary heir, be stunned and lose if had to debate
publicly the likes of Dr. Duane Gish about the theory of evolution’s scientific
merits?
Ironically, Rand took for
granted the religious foundation left her from David Hume and Immanuel Kant,
that Western philosophy had refuted natural theology in the Thomist mold (as
based in principle upon Romans 1:19-21).
She accepted the conclusions of her philosophical archenemy, Kant in “The
Critique of Pure Reason,” who refuted (to the reigning culture’s satisfaction)
the three traditional arguments (the ontological, the cosmological, and the
teleological, based on design) for God’s existence. (The true philosophical antipode to Kant is the medieval
theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), who used Greek reason to
help support the Christian faith. It’s
no coincidence, as Western culture has increasingly rejected medieval
scholasticism’s general synthesis reason and faith, that it has become both
more irreligious and less rational in the past three centuries). For someone who supposedly thought through
her intellectual foundation to the nth degree, she knew astonishingly so little
about the theory of evolution, despite it’s our civilization’s reigning myth
for refuting the argument from design.
“Darwin’s Black Box,” by Michael Behe, which it analyzes irreducible
biological complexity using an ingenious “mousetrap” analogy, demonstrates that
the argument from design is still a live issue. Contrary to Darwinism’s advocates, updated versions of William
Paley’s argument from design based upon finding a watch on a beach is still
fully intellectually credible. Although
her truly fanatical atheism utterly depends upon the truth of this metaphysical
construct that masquerades as a scientific theory, she admitted
(“Philosophy: Who Needs It,” p.
45): “I am not a student of the theory
of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent.” One of Objectivism’s most fundamental
weaknesses comes from assuming the truth of the general secular culture’s
skepticism about the rationality of faith in God and the Bible as His
revelation.
Objectivism also describes
even the high Middle Ages (c. 1050 to 1300) using the crudest kind of
Enlightenment-era historical bias.
Ironically, Aristotle had more intellectual influence than Plato when
Scholasticism was at its height than during the Renaissance. It’s not accurate to claim that the
Medievals, including even someone like Augustine, told men “to reject their mind
as an impotent tool” (“For the New Intellectual,” p. 24). Admitting the limits of human reason isn’t
the same as claiming it to be completely useless. Clearly enough, Roman Catholicism upheld all sorts of entrenched
doctrinal errors based upon tradition that required the Protestant Reformers
Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli to start to clean up as they turned to the Bible as
the ultimate source of authority.
Catholicism also plainly spilled a lot of blood during the wars of
religion it promoted against the Muslims and various religious dissidents. It unleashed the Inquisition against
suspected heretics in its midst. But in
response, note that Dinesh D’Souza’s “What’s So Great About Christianity”
usefully recounts how the Medieval church atrocities spilled far less blood
than the godless Communists did historically.
The Medieval church was a piker compared to Stalin, Mao, and Hitler,
despite it had far more centuries to deceive and oppress people than the 20th
century’s totalitarians had.
Furthermore, the church
eventually nurtured in its universities a core of intellectuals who provided
the foundation for the scientific revolution and the Renaissance. After all, in what civilization did modern
science first arise? It wasn’t in
China, India, or Islam, despite their generally greater wealth and political
stability/unity. The Medieval Muslim
philosophers never managed to break clearly with Aristotle’s awesome authority
intellectually so as to point out his scientific errors. Islam’s leading theologians fell into a
nearly blind rejection of Aristotle and belief in objective scientific
law. But even before the time of
Galileo, the West’s scholars eventually managed to figure out a way to accept
where Aristotle was right while also pointing out to where he was wrong. After all, from where did da Vinci and
Galileo get many of their ideas, such as about physics? It wasn’t merely Aristotle’s Organon. Look back to whom they built upon in their
writings, to their 14th-century predecessors at the University of Paris,
especially Buridan and Oresme. To
dismiss such men who advanced physics beyond its ancient classical foundation
as mere “witch doctors” simply isn’t credible, except among those who remain
unaware about the historical research of Stanley Jaki and Pierre Duhem into
Medieval science. How Christianity's
concept of the rationality of God was tied to the rise of science in the West
is best stated by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947):
“I do not think, however, that I have even yet
brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the
scientific movement. I mean the
inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its
antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. .
. . When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other
civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its
origin. It must come from the medieval
insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of
Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and
ordered: the search could only result
in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
For historical evidence about how Christian
belief aided instead of retarded the development of modern science, see the
books of Stanley Jaki, the Catholic philosopher of science, such as “The Savior
of Science,” “The Origin of Science and the Science of Its Origin,” “Science
and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an
Oscillating Universe.” The researcher in this matter was Pierre Duhem, who
discovered the influence of the late Medieval scholars Oresme and Buridan on
the development of physics in the hands of such renown men as Galileo and da
Vinci. Unfortunately, his encyclopedic work “Le System Du Monde” is
only available in French and isn’t readily accessible to most people even if it
had been translated into English. I also
have written a long essay on this subject, which includes many references for
further research: http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Is%20Christianity%20a%20Cause%20of%20Science.htm For a much shorter summary version that the
Institute for Creation Research published, click here: https://www.icr.org/article/christianity-cause-modern-science
Likewise, the claim that
educated people in Europe thought the world was flat can easily be refuted from
the pages of Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica”: They had no need for Columbus to prove the world was round in
order to believe that it was, which is an easily exploded historical myth. The late Medieval period can’t be merely
dismissed as the preserve of obscurantism, dogmatism, and bloodshed.
Most importantly,
Objectivism supplies no solution to why could be called mankind’s “existential
dilemma.” That is, we are all alive
now, but know we will all die one day.
So then, what will we do about it?
Can we find a way to escape death and live forever? If so, how?
The Bible reveals a solution, by accepting Jesus as personal Savior, so
that after we die, we will be resurrected to glory (or translated, as the case
may be, should we be alive when Jesus returns). After all, Jesus died, and then
returned from the dead. He experienced
death, and then came back from it. He
is the resurrection and the bread of life.
If He hadn’t actually miraculously risen from the dead, the behavior of
His earliest disciples wouldn’t have been transformed from dejected, cowardly
fear (during which Peter denied his Savior three times) into indomitable lions
who faced large crowds and publicly challenged their nation’s leadership for
crucifying the Messiah. Hence, the
reports of Jesus’ resurrection are historically reliable. If the Bible is what it says it is, then
Christians are offered eternal life. It
has a solution to death, but Rand’s philosophy doesn’t. At best, assuming it was fully right, it
only makes the lives of its adherents more pleasant before the grave overtakes
them. Unlike Christianity, Objectivism
offers its adherents only death.
A key flaw of Rand’s
metaphysical perspective stems from her refusal to see how superficial and
temporary man’s life on earth is from the viewpoint of the universe. For example, she has Dominique Francon tell
her second husband Gail Wynand (“The Fountainhead,” p. 447), “May I name
another vicious bromide you’ve never felt? . . . You’ve never felt how small
you were when looking at the ocean.”
The natural world is a visible witness of how puny and insignificant
mankind is by comparison with the God who made it all. We’re mere mortal
creatures made from the dust doomed from conception to return to dust. We’re just mayflies living fleetingly on one
bluish dust speck from the viewpoint of the (supposed) billions of years and
trillions of galaxies that compose the universe. As James observed (4:14):
“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a
little while and then vanishes away.”
From the eternal almighty God’s perspective (Isaiah 40:15): “Behold, the nations are like a drop from a
bucket, and are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales.” So given the bible’s or even secular
science’s viewpoint of man’s place in the universe, it’s simply realistic and
practical for men to have (“The Fountainhead,” p. 447) “that idea of feeling small before
nature.” Wynand objects to this line of
reasoning (p. 448): “Have you noticed
how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I’m so glad to be a
pygmy, that’s how virtuous I am.” Sure,
self-righteousness is a sin, but the motive of some being moral show-offs
doesn’t change the intrinsic, essential situation that man is in, of being a
sinner made of flesh who is doomed to die if he isn’t delivered from death by
faith in God. The presumptuous pride
Rand promotes in men for being men is patently metaphysically absurd in this
light. In this context, consider the
challenges Jehovah issued to Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38-41) about the
natural world’s wonders and its construction.
Today we are hardly in any better position to answer the Eternal’s
questions than Job was despite all the advances of scientific knowledge over
the (perhaps) past 4000 or more years since then. The most reasonable response is Job’s once we have such knowledge
(42:2-3, 5-6): “I know that Thou canst
do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be thwarted. Therefore I have declared that which I did
not understand. . . . I have heard of Thee by the haring of the ear; but
now my eye sees Thee. Therefore, I retract and I repent in dust
and ashes.” Once we human beings realize
our intrinsically limited lifespan and importance in the great scheme of
things, it’s perfectly reasonable for us to turn to God for deliverance from
the limitation of mortality and insignificance. Here Wynand simply doesn’t reflect deeply enough upon our real
metaphysical position in the universe by asking (p. 448): “What is it they fear? What is it they hate so much, those who love
to crawl? And why?” In humanity, to allude to a statement
traditionally attributed to Pascal, there is a God-shaped vacuum in every
heart. We’re made to serve and worship
God, but our evil human nature and physical desires for pleasures we can have
in the here-and-now distracts us from realizing how we can truly have joy in
our lives by serving a God and a cause far greater than ourselves.
Furthermore, man’s evil
nature under the sway of Satan chronically leads to much of the world’s misery
and pain, including war, poverty, ignorance, and bad health. As a result, even such great achievements as
the New York skyline could be vaporized in an instant by an atomic bomb. Man’s technology, the product of his reason,
is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways:
The same skills used to make cars can be used to make tanks, the same
talents used to take X-rays can be used to produce nuclear warfare. Instead of promoting man’s well-being and
life, man’s reason can be used to injure and destroy. By accepting the truth of Scripture, the human heart can be
increasingly healed from sinful tendencies that lead to so many of these trials,
tribulations, and troubles.
Let’s commend Ayn Rand for
believing morality is absolute, which she argued for in her essay, “The Cult of
Moral Grayness” in her collection of essays, “The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.” So far as it goes, she’s right to find a
basis for values in man’s relationship with nature, that indeed “ought” can be
derived from “is.” As she explains (her
emphasis, p. 17): “An organism’s life
is its standard of value: that which
furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil. . . . Thus
the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts
of reality. The fact that a living
entity is, determines what it ought to do.”
However, Objectivism falls short by not discovering that the values that
man needs for a rational life (including a rational happiness, not just mere
survival) in relationship to the world that are only there because God built
them into nature and set up that relationship.
(Objectivism plainly agrees with the spirit of the 19th-century British
philosopher John Stuart Mill’s statement that it’s better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied since not all pleasures or means of survival
are commensurate or morally equal).
It’s for this reason that the pagan gentiles, who knew nothing about
God’s word, could still obey some of its dictates, based upon their human
reason and psychological needs (Romans 2:14-15):
“When Gentiles who have not the law do by
nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do
not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their
hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting
thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them.”
Most importantly,
Objectivist morality emphasizes justice at the grave expense of mercy, which
Christianity unites through the sacrificial atoning sacrifice of Jesus upon the
cross. It’s a major reason why so many
objectivists in the “Ayn Rand cult” of New York in the 1960s were so often
generally unhappy people: They would
condemn others as well as themselves, and find no way to get forgiveness for
the inevitable moral faults that they felt they committed according to their
own absolute moral code. They were like
atheistic self-righteous Pharisees who would judge and condemn others for their
faults based on the Objectivist moral code instead of the Torah and the Mishnah
(traditional oral law). The truth of
Scripture is a relief by comparison (James 1:13): “Mercy triumphs over judgment.”
The same writer in the same verse, however, also warns: “For judgment will be merciless to one who
has shown no mercy.” Ayn Rand herself
routinely showed no mercy towards friends and associates who deviated from the
Objectivist party line in any significant detail in the 1960s and 1970s, not
realizing how much misery she was making for others and inflicting even upon
herself by constantly breaking off relationships with others. In this context, it’s worth pointing out
that to have unconditional love for someone need not lead to condoning or
ignoring their sins or moral faults, much as God loves the human race, but
wants us to have faith and repent before we can have the gift of eternal
life. Love must be tough (cf. Hebrews
12:5-11), not mere squishy “kindness” as C.S. Lewis defined it in “The Problem
of Pain.” True love seeks the
improvement of the one so loved, not merely the removal of his, her, or its
pain. This is the trap that Ellsworth
Toohey lures Peter Keating into when speaking (“The Fountainhead,” p.
293): “‘Kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the
only one. . . . We must be kind, peter, to everyone around us. We must accept and forgive.” However, much as God loves us but demands
everything of us before ultimately rewarding us with even more than we can
imagine spiritually, we can’t always be nice to others when they sin, since if
we condone sin, we help perpetuate it.
It’s better to challenge (say) an alcoholic to repent than to keep
comforting him in his miserable condition.
As it is written (Proverbs 27:5):
“Better is open rebuke than love that is concealed.”
Are human beings born into
this world with no duties towards their Creator or others? Atheists and agnostics naturally assume
there aren’t any towards God, even as they inconsistently endless carp and
complain about God’s supposed failure to end the pain and misery in the
world. That is, they don’t feel any
responsibility to obey God, which would end a lot of those evils, even as they
feel God has a responsibility to them.
If there is no supernatural revelation, such as the bible’s, then this
perspective makes some philosophical sense.
But if there is such revelation, and the revelation says that (well) we
owe God a lot, then this kind of reasoning collapses. Consider in this light the mentality of the character Gail Wynand
in “The Fountainhead,” when he reasons (p. 550): “If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a
supreme judge and naming one’s record, I would offer, with all of my pride, not
any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside
sanction.” Notice this perspective’s
astonishing level of defiance proclaimed, since it assumes that a creature
never owes anything to its Creator. It
also claims that we can just make up whatever moral code we want on our own,
whether it be based on reason, tradition, or emotion. But if the bible is true when it says, “All men sin and come
short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and “For the wages sin pays is death”
(Romans 6:23), we had better look for a solution to this essential, unavoidable
problem of our existence. The Creator
morally has us in His crosshairs with His finger on the hair trigger. Only by having faith in God’s Son the Savior
(John 3:16, 18) do we humans get the privilege of having that gun of eternal
death turned away from us. Furthermore,
the Creator gets to define the terms of the deal, not us; we just get to choose
the benefits if we accept it, and what the consequences are if we choose to
reject it. As Moses told ancient Israel
before entering the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 30:19): “I call heaven and earth to witness against
you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the
curse. So choose life in order that you
may live, you and your descendants.” In
addition, the self-assertion of a creature’s superiority against other
creatures and against God is called “pride.”
Besides stirring up much strife and conflict among men, it also renders
a man ridiculous in God’s sight, much as Job appeared when Jehovah confronted
him out of the whirlwind.
Ayn Rand was keen about the
problems inherent in pursuing a good reputation or popularity with other people
when such opinions are so ephemeral and slippery. People’s opinions of others can be so easily distorted for bad
reasons, including the maliciousness and enviousness of others. Furthermore, to find out who is responsible
for one’s unfairly poor reputation is nearly impossible to find or trace; it’s
a headless monster. She has Dominique
Francon, who marries successively three of the leading male characters of “The
Fountainhead,” cynically tell her first husband, Peter Keating, who is obsessed
with his image in other people’s minds (p. 425): “But you have to flatter people whom you despise in order to
impress other people who despise you.” Rand’s novels serve as a warning against
conformity for the sake of conformity alone.
Her deeper insights into this problem make her work generally superior
to that of Sinclair Lewis, who also dealt with the problem of conformity to
social pressures in such novels as “Main Street,” “Babbit,” and
“Arrowsmith.” Indeed, a most
interesting extended literary comparison could be made between “The
Fountainhead” and “Arrowsmith.” It
would be worth considering whether the latter novel had some influence on the
former. (In the same light would be to
compare the descriptions of the respective rape scenes of “Gone with the Wind”
and “The Fountainhead,” although the latter was plainly by implied
invitation. Furthermore, to a degree
like G.K. Chesterton, Rand was fond of paradoxes at times, and indulges in them
frequently when describing her characters’ actions and thoughts, which we see
with the sadomasochistic aspects of Roark’s sexual relationship with Dominique
Francon).
Despite being an atheist,
Ayn Rand is to be praised for never complaining about the problem of evil: She never morally condemns God for giving
humanity free will. Indeed, she denied
the spirit of most of her fellow atheists and agnostics by optimistically
upholding what she called the benevolent universe premise, that pain need not
be an intrinsic, fundamental part of mankind’s relationship to the
universe. Since death and much pain
from bad health simply can’t be avoided in this life before Jesus’ return, she
was unduly optimistic. As it is
written, it’s appointed once for all men to die (Hebrews 9:27). Rand’s follower, Robert Hessen, fails to
realize this when writing, “The misery in which women lived before capitalism,
might have made them cherish the New Testament injunction: ‘Love not the world, nor the things that are
in the world.’ But the productive
splendor of capitalism vanquished that view” (“Capitalism the Unknown Ideal,”
p. 117). But does materialism ever
fully satisfy us? Does having modern
luxuries solve the problems of death, bad family relationships, and even much
bad health? Does having indoor plumbing
fix bad marriages? Does having
electricity ultimately prevent death?
However, there’s some Scriptural foundation ironically Rand’s
optimism: Revelation 21:4 shows that
evil is indeed a temporary intruder in the universe. After having served its ultimate purpose, the evil that entered
the world when Satan rebelled and when Adam and Eve sinned will one day be
banished by the power of God. Because
Objectivism upholds a code of moral absolutes that it attempts to objectively
derive from nature and mankind’s relationship with it, it parts company from
most atheists and agnostics, who opportunistically attack God for allowing evil
despite they also deny evil exists based upon moral relativism. (Of course, if one believes nothing is
immoral, then it would be consistent to believe it’s fine for God to allow anything
and everything “bad” to happen. If it’s
always immoral to judge and condemn others, then it’s also immoral to judge and
condemn God for anything He does or doesn’t do). In this regard, Objectivism isn’t totally wrong, but definitely
falls short, by properly but selectively perceiving how life need not be
miserable all the time, but it passes over how inevitably we’ll all grow sick
and die, even if we’ve all lived rational lives by its moral code.
Rand was gravely wrong to
confuse the sacrifice of physical values with the sacrifice of one’s moral
beliefs. For some reason, she assumes
that altruism requires not the giving of some money to the poor or quality time
to the disadvantaged, but the forfeiture of fundamental beliefs when it would
be dishonest to do so. In effect,
altruism preaches a duty to lie and to deny reality in her viewpoint. In his confessional speech to the mediocre,
copycat architect Peter Keating, the leading villain of “The Fountainhead,”
Ellsworth Toohey proclaims this perverse reasoning, which isn’t at all biblical
or truly Christian (p. 636): “Since the
supreme ideal [of altruism] is beyond his [mankind’s] grasp, he give up
eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value.” Similarly, she has Gail Wynand, the corrupt
newspaper publisher, proclaim when he’s trying to overcome a lifetime of
selling out his integrity for power and money (p. 625):
“Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity?
His honor? His freedom? His ideal?
His convictions? The honesty of
his feelings? The independence of his
thought? But these are a man’s supreme
possessions. Anything he gives up for
them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain.
They, however, are above sacrificing to any acuse of consideration to
any cause of consideration whatsoever.
Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice?”
When a Christian martyr chooses to die
instead of denying Christ, as has happened so often in history, that’s no
different in spirit than Howard Roark’s decision to choose to work in a quarry
rather than build a large skyscraper that incorporated compromises in design
that he deemed unacceptable. The
sincere Christian simply believes that his relationship with his Savior, which
is founded on specific beliefs about Him, should never be publicly denied, even
at the expense of his continued life.
For example, Polycarp, whom Rome martyred around 155 A.D. when he was 86
years old, reasoned with the official interviewing him: "How then can I
blaspheme my King and Savior? You threaten me with a fire that burns for a
season, and after a little while is quenched; but you are ignorant of the fire
of everlasting punishment that is prepared for the wicked." For those Christians who could have
worshiped Caesar, and then saved their physical lives, that would be a betrayal
like John Galt’s choosing to stop striking to please his torturers in order to
avoid the pain of the electric shocks administered to him near the end of the
novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
Let’s examine further this concept that
altruism somehow requires people to give up their fundamental beliefs. Is this a biblical concept? It clearly isn’t. Rand has set up a straw man and knocked it down, at least from a
conservative Christian viewpoint. Let’s
give a concrete example of a command to help the poor as found in the Torah
(Deuteronomy 15:7-8): “If there is a
poor man with you, one of your brothers, in any of your towns in your land
which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, nor
close your hand from your poor brother [i.e., countryman]; but you shall freely
open your hand to him, and shall generously lend him sufficient for his need in
whatever he lacks.” Does giving up some
money to help the poor require anyone to sacrifice their fundamental religious
beliefs? Clearly not. The Bible is full
of commands that Jews and later Christians should never compromise on their
worship of the true God by worshiping other gods. Unlike the gods of pagan faiths that surrounded ancient Israel,
Yahweh was utterly insistent upon mankind’s exclusive devotion to Him and Him
only. According to the First
Commandment, He is a “jealous God”
(Exodus 20:5) who is utterly intolerant of any worship of or service to other
gods. As a result of these commands,
conservative Christians (and Jews) who really believe the bible (or Tanakh) is
the infallible, inerrant word of God will not compromise or bend on their
fundamental beliefs for any reason.
There’s no reason why giving up X percentage of our income to help the
poor or others in need would cause us to give up our belief in Jesus as the
Savior of the world and God as its Creator.
When Ellsworth Toohey, the
intellectual collectivist and chief villain of the “The Fountainhead” explains
altruism to his somewhat perplexed and unhappy niece, he uses exaggerated
descriptive terms that are reminiscent of a Buddhist perspective, not a
Christian one: “You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine
Halsey is. . . . Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you’ve
found yourself feeling cruel toward people [while working as a social worker
for the poor]. . . . You must be
willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean—anything, my
dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no
longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your
soul—only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates
of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you.” (Rand’s emphasis, p. 365, 1971 New American Library
version). In the Christian perspective,
what makes man matter is that God cares.
If God didn’t care about mankind in general, and each individual soul in
particular, as demonstrated by the awesomely terrifying voluntary sacrifice of
God on a couple of pieces of wood at the hands of His creatures, our lives
would matter no more than those of dogs, cats, rats, and bedbugs. Our mortal lives, by their very nature, are
as superficial and temporary as the mayflies and butterflies that live for a
few hours, days, or weeks. But because
Jesus died for us, each individual ever born matters to God. The problem isn’t the individual nature of
the human race, but how we react to it.
If we love God above all and our fellow men as ourselves, as per the two
great commandments, then our motivation will be correct. Furthermore, the end doesn’t justify the
means, since Christianity is a system of moral absolutes. So Christians should never be cruel or
dishonest in fighting their own personal individual moral flaws or those of
other people. Clearly, the passivity
encouraged her by Toohey is clearly much more like that of Buddhism and
Hinduism, including the idea of losing and forgetting one’s identity. Unlike the Hindu perspective, in which the
goal is to gain an ultimate end to the suffering of the
birth/death/reincarnation/transmigration lifecycle by being absorbed into
brahma, Christians have souls that will always have a personal identity that’s
separate from God’s. We must reject the
pantheistic, “All is one, God is all” viewpoint, which logically leads to the
idea of the extinguishing of each individual’s identity and sense of
consciousness that’s separate from others.
Notice that in the Christian
perspective righteousness and ultimately happiness are gained by believers even
in this life as they embrace God, including His Son Jesus. God isn’t a giant Killjoy desperately
seeking to make human beings miserable by imposing His law on them. If we obey the Ten Commandments, we would be
much happier than if we don’t. To march
through the last five of these commandments for some examples, if no one
murdered other people, or stole from them, or committed adultery, or lied, or
wrongly desired someone else’s possessions, we would all be much better
off. Because God loves us, His law is
given to us to help us, not to hurt us, including in this life, not just the
next life. So if we feel chronically
unhappy and alienated, such as the character Gail Wynand, the wealthy,
powerful, ruthless newspaper chain owner, appears when he is meditating upon
suicide (“The Fountainhead,” pp. 391, 416), we should examine how much sin,
which is the rejection of God’s will for our lives as described by His law, is
the source of our trouble. Happiness
often comes, as has been observed by many, when it is pursued indirectly, not
directly. Playboys are seldom truly
happy, even as they have virtually unlimited budgets and time to pursue
fleeting pleasures. People who have a
purpose or cause above their own personal material concerns are much more
likely to feel their lives have meaning and thus feel contented. To allude to a statement traditionally
attributed to the French scientist Blaise Pascal, in every human heart there is
a God-shaped vacuum seeking to be filled.
In the case of Christianity, since it is a religious worldview that’s
most compatible with the nature of mankind, it will produce the most
contentment and even joy in the long term when sincerely believed and actually
practiced even when trials, tests, and tribulations inevitably appear in life.
The practice and definition
of “love” advanced in “The Fountainhead” doesn’t fit the Christian perspective,
which is based on the two great commandments (Matthew 22:36-38). If a Christian is to love his neighbor as
himself (Leviticus 19:18), then he shouldn’t show partiality either way,
regardless of the behavior of others.
This is the foundation for Christ’s teaching that Christians should love
their enemies (Matthew 5:43-48) as God Himself does, not just their
friends. In the case of Ellsworth
Toohey’s mother, she perversely loved her healthy daughter less than her sickly
son (“The Fountainhead,” p. 295): “The
girl was so obviously more deserving of love that it seemed just to deny it to
her.” To attend to the narrow point
first, a Christian parent should aim to love all of his or her children
equally, which means to have an outgoing concern for their well-being. The Book of Genesis is full of the family
troubles provoked when parents played favorites, such as Isaac and Rebekah with
Esau and Jacob, and in turn Jacob with Joseph.
And as many today can attest from personal experience, parental
favoritism still leaves behind it a devastating emotional and psychological
toll in many cases. But to make the
broader point, since Christians are to become like God in character (Matthew
5:48), we should have an outgoing concern for everyone while avoiding
partiality (James 1:1-4). So although
Christians shouldn’t love the more lovable more than the less lovable, they
shouldn’t fail to love them either, as Ellsworth Toohey’s mother did.
Rand also routinely
described altruism in exaggerated terms that assumed it had to incorporate the
use of force to accomplish its objectives, such as in her definition of
socialism’s goals in “For the New Intellectual” (her emphasis, p. 43): “Socialism is the doctrine that man has no
right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him,
but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his
service to society, and that society man dispose of him in any way it pleases
for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal collective good.” But true Christianity follows the spirit of
the Sermon of the Mount: If Christians
are really supposed to be pacifists and to turn the cheek, they obviously
shouldn’t be forcing people to care for the poor in violation of the eighth
commandment. An officer of the
Salvation Army who robbed people door to door in order to really help the poor
is plainly acting immorally: The end
doesn’t justify the means. If we say
altruism should always be voluntary, at least on this side of the millennium,
so many of Rand’s objections fall to the ground. Consider this exaggeration, from the same book, p. 54: “The primordial morality of altruism, with
its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror, and sacrificial
furnaces.” How does the Salvation
Army’s voluntarily helping the worthy poor to not starve in the streets
necessarily cause the kinds of miseries unleashed by Communist and Fascist
dictators?
Another deep error of Rand’s
philosophy is to see altruism as merely a moral weapon used against the
independent creators to subordinate and to enslave them. For example, Roark says in his defense
during his trial for having blown up the public housing project called Corlandt
because its builders didn’t follow his exact design (“The Fountainhead,” p.
684):
“From the beginning of
history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first
second-hander responded. He invented
altruism. The creator—denied, opposed,
persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on
his energy. The second-hander
contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: The individual against the collective.”
However, when we view almost all of history,
in almost all civilizations and major cultures, the elite normally did little
to nothing to earn their positions.
(Sure, some partial exceptions arose, such as China’s system of
selecting its civil servants by their ability to pass tests based largely on
their rote memorization and interpretation of their literary classics). People were born into the positions that
they later occupied, whether they became slaves, serfs, artisans, soldiers,
aristocrats, or kings. Social mobility
was nearly zero, especially within the same generation for the same
individuals. One of the most
provocative assertions of W.H. McNeil in his general history of humanity “The
Rise of the West” concerns the necessity of an elite to be exploitative in
order for a high culture to exist (p. 313):
“[The] limitations of ancient technology made civilization very
costly. Only when many toiled and
suffered deprivation could a privileged few have the leisure and ease needful
for the creation and maintenance of high culture.” That is, most of the difference between the rulers and ruled was
due to accidents of birth, not merit.
Their condition of superior education and polished culture was
ultimately based upon involuntary expropriation in the form of taxes, tribute,
labor services, etc. from the rude, crude, ignorant slaves, serfs, and/or
peasants who composed 90% or more of most civilizations’ people. Therefore, to
ask the members of the ruling class to aspire to a system of self-sacrificing
paternalism that was less exploitive and more kind to those they controlled by
mere happenstance of birth is perfectly reasonable. To ask a landed aristocracy to give something back in charity to
those from whom their wealth was (often forcibly) derived was merely a request
to sacrifice some needless luxuries. It’s hardly “exploitive” to ask the
wealthy of such social systems to take less by force or by trickery from those
on whom they have their boots firmly planted.
Very, very few of the wealthy of most of human history could be called
some kind of creative geniuses or be men of superior merit before the
industrial revolution began in Great Britain c. 1750, including when their
wealth was based on the exploitation of high rates of compound interest,
trickery and violence in trade, not just a great lord’s demand for one-sided
labor services from his serfs on his land several days a week.
Another deep error of Ayn
Rand’s was to assume that all Christians everywhere at all times had to give up
everything to the poor and weak, if they lived by what the Bible teaches, in
order to be saved. She always equated
altruism with sacrificing everything to someone else, leaving nothing for
oneself. For example, notice how Rand
describes altruism so exaggeratedly in this passage from John Galt’s speech in
“Atlas Shrugged,” her emphasis:
“You fear the man who has a
dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a
moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that
dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded.
The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your
frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give
and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is
still unpaid by others--you struggle to evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that
by the moral standard you've accepted, you are guilty every moment of your
life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone
somewhere on earth--and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you
conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will
muddle through by snatching as snatch can . . .”
Now self-sacrifice and good works on the
model of Mother Teresa’s in Calcutta should be greatly admired. But a proper interpretation of the Bible
when all the relevant passages are considered, not just that concerning what
Jesus told the young rich ruler, shows most Christians need not live as she did
in order to receive salvation. There’s
a difference between having the faith and the corresponding good works that
show one’s truly saved and going beyond the normal call of duty. For example, note that the standard amount
to be given to the poor under the Old Testament law works out to an annualized
basis of 2.7% of gross income, since the third tithe was only collected every
third and sixth years in a seven-year cycle.
“Tough love” also has a role to play when wisely but charitably
attempting to aid the poor (cf. II Thess. 3:6-11). The old Victorian distinction between the worthy and unworthy
poor is fully sound, although naturally many gradations among a continuum exist
between both groups. For example, to
give cash to a known unrecovered alcoholic homeless man will likely increase
his misery eventually, not reduce it.
Christians indeed do have a duty to care for the poor, but it’s hardly
an unlimited responsibility that requires them to feel constantly guilty for
every dollar that they don’t give away above their bare survival needs.
This
Randian straw man needs more examination.
Does God really require us to never act from a self-interested or
pleasuring-seeking motive of any kind?
C. S. Lewis, in “The Problem of Pain,” examines the flaws in this kind
of reasoning in some detail (p. 98):
“Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical [in
destroying a creature’s sense of self-sufficiency by appealing to its
self-interest], do not know what they ask.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from
the purest and best motives, who could be saved?” After all, the Christian goal from all this self-sacrifice in
this life is to gain eternal life and to have a higher rather than a lower
position in the kingdom of God.
Furthermore, so much of what is supposedly “given up” really isn’t good
for us anyway. Obedience to God’s law
is for our own good even in the short-run in this life, let alone to show that
we have sufficient faith to receive eternal life in the world to come. If people didn’t murder, steal, lie, commit
adultery/fornication, and covet, we all would be much better off in this life,
sooner or later. The same is true from
serving only the true God faithfully without using graven images as an aid to
worship and without using His name in vain uselessly. That would eliminate so much of the present world’s sense of
alienation and meaninglessness about life.
The great paradox of self-sacrifice from a Christian viewpoint is that
we give up everything to God just to receive far more back ultimately, often in
this life, not just the next (Luke 18:22-30).
Does
the self-serving abusive use of a good principle invalidate it? Rand, using Toohey as her mouthpiece,
cynically observes (“The Fountainhead,” p. 638):
“It stands to reason that
where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being
served. The man who speaks to you of
sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters.
And intends to be the master.”
But if someone is indeed a hypocrite and is
caught being so, that will destroy his moral authority. Those who exploitatively use the principle
of altruism to exploit others inevitably receive their comeuppance, including
public embarrassment that wrecks their credibility to ask for financial
support. A classic example was the
eventual blowback generated by the Papacy’s burdensomely expensive project of
building St. Peter’s in Rome, which was the straw that broke the back of Rome’s
financial support in Germany and elsewhere.
The Italian popes of the Renaissance were notoriously corrupt, sexually
licentious, and financially grasping. The abusive practice of having people pay
for indulgences, as famously promoted by Johann Tetzel’s promotional campaign
that when stated when coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs,
led to Martin Luther’s response that upheld the principle of salvation by faith
through grace alone that eventually resulted in the Protestant
Reformation. Christ Himself warned
against those hypocritically using their spiritual positions to serve merely
for money (John 10:11-14). He told His
disciples, when they argued about who was the greatest “The kings of the
Gentiles lord it over them; and those who have authority over them are called ‘Benefactors.’ But not so with you, but let him who is the
greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as the servant.” Christ mentioned his own personal example,
that He Himself was the one who serves (Luke 22:25-26, 28). When Christians don’t live up to their own
moral code, inevitably it wrecks their moral authority. Hypocrisy doesn’t actually refute the truth
of Christianity metaphysically (http://lionofjudah1.org/Apologeticshtml/Does%20Hypocrisy%20Refute%20Christianity%20Karamazov%201106.htm),
but it has wrecked much of its potential public support nevertheless, since
people expect more from those who profess and teach in Christ’s name. To invert Toohey’s cynical observation, they
can’t expect to be served any if they don’t serve others well.
It’s a biblically sound
principle, however, for those engaged in service, such as the pastoral
ministry, to receive some reasonable material compensation for their spiritual
work, as the Apostle Paul observed (I Corinthians 9:13-14): “Do you not know that those who perform
sacred services eat the food of the temple, and those who attend regularly to
the altar have their share with the altar?
So also the Lord directed those who proclaim the gospel to get their
living from the gospel.” However, Paul
made a point of not actually using this right (verses 12, 15) while asserting
that he had it. The work of organizing
people to worship God and to help others in an organized manner deserves
compensation as well (verse 7): “Who at
any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and does not eat the fruit of it? Or who tends a flock and does not use the
milk of the flock?” Indeed, the
principle that the laborer is worthy of his wages (Luke 10:7), which
contradicts the mentality behind socialism and communism, is directly applied
to those working in spiritual service to serve fellow Christians. So although people working in spiritual
service can indeed be abusive, that doesn’t invalidate the principle of
compensating them in some reasonable manner for their work on behalf of others
who benefit from it.
Toohey,
in the same speech to Peter Keating, also mistakenly associated these thoughts
(“The Fountainhead,” p. 636): “Make man
feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity.” However, from the Christian viewpoint, when
someone confesses his sins because he has realized his guilt, that will allow
him to gain integrity, not lose it. His
aspirations, if his repentance is sincere, will change from idly seeking his
own will against God’s law and from indulging in wrongful pleasures, will
drastically change as he becomes a new man with discipline fueled by his new
perspective in life. Furthermore, by
realizing how small he is in God’s sight in this life, it ultimately allows him
to become a mighty spirit being in the next life (I John 3:2; Hebrews 2:5-14;
John 17:20-24). Christians are abased
for now, but are to be exalted later (Matthew 23:12).
Finally, a key flaw in
Rand’s general perspective is how unimportant family life is in forming
people’s characters and general personalities. Although she generally perceives marriage as a good institution,
her heroes almost never have children of their own. That shouldn’t be a surprise, when she had no children of her own
either. (She also had an abortion,
which explains much of her deeply ironic enmity against the pro-life position).
Although one can play games with the words, much like the psychological egoists
do who believe nobody is ever really self-sacrificing, it’s obvious that
raising young children requires great sacrifices from their parents until they
become truly self-supporting. Altruism,
unconditional love, and undeserved transfers are the order of the day within
the family unit, not rational selfishness based on mutually agreed
exchanges. The struggles involved in
teaching children to become responsible adults are among the most important in
most people’s lives. For nearly all
people, what they do in raising children well or badly is much more significant
in affecting the future course of society than what they do at their
occupations on a daily basis.
Furthermore, even the important professions such as medicine and law, in
which their practitioners often make life-and-death, make-or-break decisions
for others on a daily basis, turn people into narrow specialists; good children
rearing and married life use much more of the whole person’s capabilities and
talents than even these professions.
The classic problems caused by neglecting family life at the expense of
work, such as portrayed in “Death of a Salesman” and “The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit,” receive no attention in Rand’s work. Ironically for a female writer, she puts forth a male-oriented
view of self-esteem, which is derived from achievements at work, not personal
relationships well maintained.
In conclusion, Christians
can easily intellectually derail the John Galt line of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist
philosophy. As an atheistic Jew, she
plainly never seriously investigated the intellectual foundation for
Christianity, including the newer proofs for God’s existence, the flaws in the
theory of evolution, and the historical evidence for the Bible’s accuracy and
inspiration. She was unaware of the
Medieval period’s positive intellectual developments. She described absurdly altruism as unlimited and as necessarily
incorporating the use of force against those not sacrificing enough. She ignored the importance and necessary
self-sacrifice of family life in forming people’s characters and developing our
whole personalities. True, in certain
cases her philosophy is correct, such as when it attacks the general
relativistic skepticism of the reigning philosophical culture in epistemology,
metaphysics, and even ethics. Her
general philosophy is certainly preferable to David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s,
but it’s dreadfully inferior to Thomas Aquinas’ general position. Finally, although it claims to celebrate
life, Objectivism can only offer death to its adherents. Jesus Christ offers life to those who are
called, repent, and believe (John 11:25):
“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he
die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”
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