Scientific American
Eric Michael Johnson
October 5, 2012
“Every political philosophy has to begin with a theory of
human nature,” wrote Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in his
book Biology
as Ideology. Thomas Hobbes, for example, believed that humans in a
“state of nature,” or what today we would call hunter-gatherer societies, lived
a life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in which there
existed a “warre of all against all.” This led him to conclude, as many
apologists for dictatorship have since, that a stable society required a single
leader in order to control the rapacious violence that was inherent to human
nature. Building off of this, advocates of state communism, such as Vladimir
Lenin or Josef Stalin, believed that each of us was born tabula rasa,
with a blank slate, and that human nature could be molded in the interests of
those in power.
Ever since Atlas
Shrugged, Ayn Rand has been gaining prominence among American
conservatives as the leading voice for the political philosophy of
laissez-faire capitalism, or the idea that private business should be
unconstrained and that government’s only concern should be protecting
individual property rights. As I
wrote this week in Slate with my piece “Ayn Rand vs. the
Pygmies,” the Russian-born author believed that rational selfishness
was the ultimate expression of human nature.
“Collectivism,” Rand wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown
Ideal “is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to
conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent
ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it
pleases.” An objective understanding of “man’s nature and man’s relationship to
existence” should inoculate society from the disease of altruistic morality and
economic redistribution. Therefore, “one must begin by identifying man’s
nature, i.e., those essential characteristics which distinguish him from all
other living species.”
As Rand further detailed in her book The
Virtue of Selfishness, moral values are “genetically dependent” on the
way “living entities exist and function.” Because each individual organism is
primarily concerned with its own life, she therefore concludes that selfishness
is the correct moral value of life. “Its life is the standard of value
directing its actions,” Rand wrote, “it acts automatically to further its life
and cannot act for its own destruction.” Because of this Rand insists altruism
is a pernicious lie that is directly contrary to biological reality. Therefore,
the only way to build a good society was to allow human nature, like
capitalism, to remain unfettered by the meddling of a false ideology.
“Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and
with individual rights,” she continued. “One cannot combine the pursuit of
happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.” She concludes that
this conflict between human nature and the “irrational morality” of altruism is
a lethal tension that tears society apart. Her mission was to free humanity
from this conflict. Like Marx, she believed that her correct interpretation of
how society should be organized would be the ultimate expression of human
freedom.
As I demonstrated in my Slate piece, Ayn
Rand was wrong about altruism. But how she arrived at this conclusion is
revealing both because it shows her thought process and offers a warning to
those who would construct their own political philosophy on the back of an
assumed human nature. Ironically, given her strong opposition to monarchy and
state communism, Rand based her interpretation of human nature on the same
premises as these previous systems while adding a crude evolutionary argument
in order to connect them.
Rand assumed, as Hobbes did, that without a centralized
authority human life would erupt into a chaos of violence. “Warfare–permanent
warfare—is the hallmark of tribal existence,” she wrote in The
Return of the Primitive. “Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at
the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals.” This,
she reasoned, is why altruism is so pervasive among indigenous societies;
prehistoric groups needed the tribe for protection. She argued that altruism is
perpetuated as an ideal among the poor in modern societies for the same reason.
“It is only the inferior men that have collective
instincts—because they need them,” Rand wrote in a journal
entry dated February 22, 1937. This kind of primitive altruism doesn’t
exist in “superior men,” Rand continued, because social instincts serve merely
as “the weapon and protection of the inferior.” She later expands on this idea
by stating, “We may still be in evolution, as a species, and living side by
side with some ‘missing links.’”
Rand’s view that social instincts only exist among “inferior
men” should not be dismissed as something she unthinkingly jotted down in a
private journal. In two of her subsequent books—For
the New Intellectual and Philosophy:
Who Needs It?, where it even serves as a chapter heading—Rand quips
that scientists may find the “missing link” between humans and animals in those
people who fail to utilize their rational selfishness to its full potential.
How then does Rand explain the persistence of altruistic morality if human
nature is ultimately selfish? By invoking the tabula rasaas an
integral feature of human nature in which individuals can advance from inferior
to superior upwards along the chain of life.
“Man is born tabula rasa,” Rand wrote in her Introduction
to Objectivist Epistemology, “all his knowledge is based on and derived
from the evidence of his senses. To reach the distinctively human level of
cognition, man must conceptualize his perceptual data” (by which she means
using logical deductions). This was her solution to the problem of prosocial
behavior and altruism among hunter-gatherer societies.
“For instance, when discussing the social instinct—does it
matter whether it had existed in the early savages?” Rand asks in her journal
on May 9, 1934. “Supposing men were born social (and even that is a
question)—does it mean that they have to remain so? If man started as a social
animal—isn’t all progress and civilization directed toward making him an
individual? Isn’t that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of
animals, isn’t man the next step?” Nearly a decade later, on September 6, 1943,
she wrote, “The process here, in effect, is this: man is raw material when he
is born; nature tells him: ‘Go ahead, create yourself. You can become the lord
of existence—if you wish—by understanding your own nature and by acting upon
it. Or you can destroy yourself. The choice is yours.’”
While Rand states in Philosophy: Who Needs It? that
“I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its
supporter nor its opponent,” she immediately goes on to make claims about how
evolution functions. “After aeons of physiological development, the
evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of
development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species,
not their bodies” (italics mine). Rand further expands on her (incorrect) views
about evolution in her journal.
“It is precisely by observing nature that we discover that a
living organism endowed with an attribute higher and more complex than the
attributes possessed by the organisms below him in nature’s scale shares
many functions with these lower organisms. But these functions are modified by
his higher attribute and adapted to its function—not the other way around”
(italics mine). – Journals of Ayn Rand, July 30, 1945.
One would have to go back to the 18th century (and Aristotle
before that) to find a similar interpretation of nature. This concept of “the great chain of
being,” brilliantly discussed by the historian Arthur
Lovejoy, was the belief that a strict hierarchy exists in the natural world
and species advance up nature’s scale as they get closer to God. This is an odd
philosophy of nature for an avowed atheist, to say the least, and reflects
Rand’s profound misunderstanding of the natural world.
To summarize, then, Rand believed in progressive evolutionary
change up the ladder of nature from primitive to advanced. At the “higher
stages” of this process (meaning humans) evolution changed course so that
members of our species were born with a blank slate, though she provides no
evidence to support this. Human beings therefore have no innate “social
instincts”–elsewhere she refers to it as a “herd-instinct”–that is, except for
“primordial savages” and “inferior men” who could be considered missing links
in the scale of nature. Never mind that these two groups are still technically
human in her view. Selfishness is the ideal moral value because “superior men”
are, by definition, higher up the scale of being.
Logic was essential to Ayn Rand’s political philosophy. “A
contradiction cannot exist,” she has John Galt state in Atlas Shrugged.
“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to
maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from
the realm of reality.” I couldn’t agree more. However, Rand may have had more
personal reasons for her philosophy that can help explain her tortured logic.
As she was first developing her political philosophy she mused in her journal
about how she arrived at her conclusion that selfishness was a natural moral
virtue.
“It may be considered strange, and denying my own supremacy of
reason, that I start with a set of ideas, then want to study in order to
support them, and not vice versa, i.e., not study and derive my ideas from
that. But these ideas, to a great extent, are the result of a subconscious
instinct, which is a form of unrealized reason. All instincts are reason,
essentially, or reason is instincts made conscious. The “unreasonable”
instincts are diseased ones.” – Journals of Ayn Rand, May 15, 1934.
This can indeed be considered strange. Looking deep within
yourself and concluding that your feelings are natural instincts that apply for
the entire species isn’t exactly what you would call objective. It is, in fact,
the exact opposite of how science operates. However, she continues and
illuminates her personal motivations for her ideas.
“Some day I’ll find out whether I’m an unusual specimen of
humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the
reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I
trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually
intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is
also a form of superior intelligence.”
Through a close reading of her fictional characters, and other
entries in her journal, it appears that Rand had an intuitive sense that
selfishness was natural because that’s how she saw the world. As John Galt said
in his final climactic speech, “Since childhood, you have been hiding the
guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code,
but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral
‘instincts’ which others profess to feel.”
In Rand’s notes for an earlier, unpublished story she
expresses nearly identical sentiments for the main character. “He [Danny
Renahan] is born with,” she writes, “the absolute lack of social instinct or
herd feeling.”
“He does not understand, because he has no organ for
understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people. (One
instance when it is blessed not to have an organ of understanding.) Other
people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. He
knows himself—and that is enough. Other people have no right, no hold, no
interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen—it’s inborn,
absolute, it can’t be changed, he has ‘no organ’ to be otherwise. In this
respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize
and feel ‘other people.’ (That’s what I meant by thoughts as feelings, as part
of your nature.) (It is wisdom to be dumb about certain things.)”
I believe a strong case could be made that Ayn Rand was
projecting her own sense of reality into the mind’s of her fictional
protagonists. Does this mean that Rand was a sociopath? Diagnosing people in
the past with modern understandings of science has many limitations (testing
your hypothesis being chief among them). However, I think it’s clear that Ayn
Rand did not have a strongly developed sense of empathy but did have a very
high opinion of herself. When seen through this perspective, Rand’s philosophy
of “Objectivism” and her belief in “the virtue of selfishness” look very
different from how she presented it in her work. When someone’s theory of human
nature is based on a sample size of 1 it raises doubts about just how objective
they really were.
About the Author: Eric Michael Johnson has a
Master's degree in Evolutionary Anthropology focusing on great ape behavioral
ecology. He is currently a doctoral student in the history of science at
University of British Columbia looking at the interplay between evolutionary
biology and politics.
