Objectivism? Eh what?
and dollars…
As a person with a bad habit of self-isolating, I occasionally check out the possibility of meet-ups in my area. So I was amused by one that definitely didn’t appeal, except for playing a ‘fly in the ointment’ role. It’s called ‘capitalism and coffee – an objectivist meet-up’, and is based on the ‘philosophy’ of Ayn Rand – of course.
So it’s back to the free will issue, one which, I must admit, I quite enjoy rabbiting on about. So, even the most ardent libertarian or free will enthusiast will have to admit that, say, humans aren’t free to become sperm whales, and vice versa. We’re definitely trapped in our species-dom. Even so, every sperm whale is an individual, as is every human. And isn’t this individuality a feature of every dog or cat you’ve ever owned or known? I’ve been familiar with quite a few. But we don’t tend to believe that their (mostly) delightful uniqueness is entirely of their own making, or even partially so. Different breeds have different characteristics, and within those breeds there are levels of timidity, gregariousness, aggression and so on. So each of these pets is unique, but not by choice. So why do we, or some of us, like to believe that we are free to choose our own nature? Our individuality is evident enough, there is nobody else on the planet quite like us, but nobody else has experienced quite the same parenting and formative experience. Even physically, we’re virtually never mistaken for somebody else.
Of course, freedom is appealing – what could be more so? We’re appalled by what is being imposed on people in Ukraine, in Palestine, in North Korea, in El Salvador, and by the impoverished circumstances of children in many regions, who haven’t had the luck of being born to comfortably-off parents in a WEIRD country.
So the place and circumstances in which we’re born are heavily determinising, if that’s a word (it is now – freedom!), but what about the time. I happen to be reading an epic historical study, God’s War, by Christopher Tyerman – well over 900 pages covering the crusading adventures from the 11th century to the 15th, four major crusades and a plethora of minor ones, including the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc and southern Europe. Talk about the past being another country – they do things horribly there. The world Tyerman describes is dominated by more or less fervent religion, which isn’t to say that land-grabbing, rank-pulling and other forms of capitalism aren’t massively in evidence. And reading about it raises obvious questions for me.
I was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1956. What if I’d been born in around the same region in, say, 1156? The town of Dundee probably didn’t exist then – certainly Australia, to which I was taken at the age of five, was then a piece of land completely unknown to northerners. At that time Scotland was being harried by Vikings in the west, 15-year-old Malcolm IV sat uneasily on the throne (of Alba, as it was then known), and Henry II had only recently begun his long reign in the dominant south, after years of civil war. But of course one thing that held fast was religion, i.e Christianity. The Norman conquest had reinforced Catholicism, with Scotland only just beginning to assert independence from the south in religious matters (full independence was attained in 1192 as a result of the Papal Bull of Celestine III, apparently).
There was no way that I could’ve been anything but a Catholic Christian myself in 1192 – as an ageing 36-year-old. And who knows, I might’ve been fit and fervent enough to join the party for the third crusade of that time, led by Richard Coeur de Lion, no less – among other worthies and unworthies. In any case, the last thing on my mind would’ve been free will and capitalist enterprise.
Nowadays, though, free will has become an issue. With the decline of religion in most of the WEIRD world, some have, it seems, come to believe that they are their own gods. But a few problems arise, for obviously we don’t get to choose our parents, our genetic inheritance, the time and place of our birth, our experiences in the womb or in our early childhood. The Dunedin longitudinal study of health and development, which began in the early seventies, and which I’ve written about previously, while not of course designed to ‘prove’ hard determinism, categorised participants in terms of personality types – Well-Adjusted, Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, and Reserved, and has found that those individual types have barely changed over fifty years. Yet within those types there are differences, making every single person on the planet quite unique. But of course uniqueness is not a proof of free will.
So how did Ayn Rand argue otherwise? What is the ‘objectivism’ that she espoused? That’s not an easy question to answer. It certainly isn’t meant as an opposite to ‘subjectivism’, and it seems that very little of her writing analyses the concept of free will directly. Let me take a piece of it for my own analysis:
If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality confronts a man with a great many “must’s”, but all of them are conditional: the formula of realistic necessity is: “you must, if –” and the if stands for man’s choice: “if you want to achieve a certain goal”. [from an essay collection – Philosophy, who needs it? – published in 1982, the year of her death]
Rand always uses the male perspective, and was always bizarrely anti-feminist. Apart from that, much of her writing strikes me as pseudo-philosophical, as this passage shows. What is meant by a rational ethics? Are there examples of irrational ethics? Are there unrealistic necessities? Indeed, who needs this philosophy? But to be fair, perhaps this is a bad, decontextualised example. The central point of all this though, is that Rand never really presents a free will argument. Free will, or what she calls ‘volitional consciousness’, is at the heart of her world-view, but it certainly isn’t adequately explained. The term itself suggests the feeling we have when we make a decision, but those feelings, and that decision, are those of a mind or brain that is wholly determined. How could it not be? And not self-determined, because what is an individual self other than an entirely determined entity? How could it be otherwise? And that seems to be the key mistake that libertarians make (apparently Rand didn’t consider herself a libertarian, but that just seems quibbling). They mistake complexity for self-determination, because we’re undoubtedly highly complex beings, perhaps even approaching some cetaceans in that department.
Of course, Rand is simply the product of her upbringing and early experiences. I don’t know much about her background, except that it wasn’t that of a Dalit in Hindu India, or an Aboriginal in Australia, or a Bantu in the DRC, or a woman in ‘modern’ Afghanistan. And of course I’m not at all surprised that her philosophy is popular in the USA. Nor am I particularly surprised that there’s a meet-up dedicated to it here in dear old Adelaide. Actually, I wouldn’t mind attending – but not as myself, more as a ‘fly on the wall’, listening to how they justify and promote themselves. Sadly, though, flies only have a fly’s neural system.
But -that’s determinism for you.
References
https://www.meetup.com/adelaide-ayn-rand-meetup/
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war; a new history of the crusades, 2006
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