Ayn Rand II

Freddie DeBoer responds in the comments section to my post on Ayn Rand, which in turn was a response to his post:

Someone who I respect has long made this important point: Rand's philosophy was, in its infant stages, a very direct response to her experiences with Stalinism. It would be truly unfair for me to fail to keep that in mind when I think about her. Where I think criticism remains is in the fact that she lived in America for many decades (and could see very well that, for all of its advantages over Bolshevism, American capitalism wasn't some perfect machine for sorting the virtuous), without ever moderating her message; and in the fact that her followers don't have the excuse of intimate exposure to Stalinism, which makes their devotion to Objectivism less defensible. From my perspective, anyway.

There's a lot in this paragraph that resonated with me, actually.

Point one of what resonated: I was born in Israel, and thusly am descended from families that were fleeing the Holocaust. The national trauma that still exists in Israel is hard even for me, as an Israeli of Israelis, to fathom. It isn't often on the surface of national discussion, but if you push hard against most of the positions taken in Israel, it bubbles up suddenly, lashing out. The increasingly right-wing nation can only be understood in the context of the fading hope for a national haven from the Holocaust.

People close in my family will distance themselves from the rabid right in Israel, but sometimes interject something like, "You can understand where they come from, right?" Well, I can understand how they came to exist. But I don't know if I can call that any more or less "defensible" than those whose hatred I can't easily understand. What makes anyone's hatred or anger more or less defensible? It isn't as though there's a hard-and-fast rule that people who survive terrible tragedies are incapable of seeing beyond hate and fear -- for every Meir Kahane, there's an Elie Wiesel.

It's tough. There's a fine line between "understanding" and "defending." There are those who explain contemporary Israeli policy, and there are those who defend contemporary Israeli policy, and it is important to understand where you fall between that.

Also, speaking of Israeli policy, the current lowest of the low points in Israeli is Avigdor Lieberman who, like Ayn Rand, fled the Soviet Union. Do I understand that, growing up in the oppressive, anti-semitic Soviet Union, he'd be willing to stop at nothing to preserve the "Jewish character" of Israel? Perhaps. But I have no desire to defend him. Regardless of what has happened to him, he should be condemned.

On the other hand, Freddie's post deals with people who are Objectivist (I hate that name, by the way, it doesn't line up with what that philosophy means to me, but okay I'll bite). It takes a remarkable generosity of spirit to remain in dialogue with people who hold extreme views. As Freddie aptly puts it, "There's a lesson, in all of this, I think, about charity, and about grace." Scott Walters also commented on the "lack of generosity" with which Ayn Rand viewed the world. It resonated with me, reminiscent of the difficulty of conversations with the arch-conservative I lived with. That's the second point.

One of the lessons I learned there is to figure out where to fight, and where to let things slide. There's a tendency for us to grip each of our ideas as though they are our most important. Over the last year I've realized, for instance, that the government's decision to authorize torture is one of those hold-your-ground moments.

(from the testimony:

Chairman Conyers: I didn't ask you if you ever gave him advice, I asked you do you think the President could order a suspect buried alive?
Yoo: Mr. Chairman, my view right now, is I don't think a president would - no American president would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.

See that? "I don't think a president would bury someone alive. But if he wanted to...")

The last thing I wanted to say is that Freddie's comment only further underscores how interesting it is that Ayn Rand's writings have lasted so long, and with such visceral power. See, she was writing in response to a specific context, the context that Freddie pointed out: the context of having escaped from Stalin's grasp. That is a uniquely gone context. Firstly, the context faded with the end of Stalin's reign of terror (not to diminish the fear and negative atmosphere of the rest of Soviet history, but Stalinism was a whole other league; post-Stalin is Iran, Stalin is North Korea). Then, the context faded with the end of the Cold War, when the "evil empire" left the daily reality for a new generation of Americans.

And remember, although this context was real for Ayn Rand, it was almost diametrically opposed to Americans' experiences. When Ayn Rand was writing, it was the one period in which more people were leaving the United States than were entering.

And also remember that for the Rand-devotees of my generation, the threat of "socialism" has gotten a lot more vague. Even in "Communist" China, the command economy has devolved into some pseudo-communist/pseudo-capitalist nether-economy. Our biggest threats have not come from the socialist countries (although North Korea has always been a managed risk), but rather from collapsed economies -- areas that were marginalized in the aftermath of the Cold War, such as post-Colonial Africa, Afghanistan, or the Middle East. With the exception of trust-fund ideologues like the Christmas Day undie-bomber, our biggest threats are linked to crippling poverty.

Anyways, my point is not to criticize Rand (although you can tell I think her world-view completely unrelated to the world we actually live in) but to marvel at the fact that many are more beguiled by the possibility of dangers that Rand seems to hint at then the real, immediate dangers of the world around us. Compared to, say, Muslim extremism, Rand's dangers are somewhat hypothetical. That's not to say she's wrong -- this is also the power of Orwell's writings, or of the Constitution itself -- but it's strange that it has so tangible an impact (you can't say that Orwell has the same devoted following).

Rand is an interesting case. She strikes so far outside of her context, and she grips the people she strikes.

Why Art Springs From Discontent

Aldous Huxley's Orwellian dystopia, Brave New World, ends with a confrontation between a group of misfits who are at odds with the controlled, perfect utopia, and the Controller who keeps the world running perfectly. Each of them, for their own reason, can't fit into the mass of chemically-happy people they see in the world around them.

[Spoiler alert, I suppose]

The Controller is a friendly, understanding gentleman, as opposed to the rulers of George Orwell's world in 1984. Rather than disciplining them, he offers them a choice: they can return to their drug-ridden happy (and boring) world, or they can accept exile to an archipelago of islands where they will be surrounded by the other discontents in a suitably "normal" world--far away from the utopia.

The difference between Orwell's world and Huxley's world is that in Huxley's world, "counter-culture" is part of the plan. There are simply two choices: the utopia, or the islands. Orwell, on the other hand, creates a world in which the counter-culture is broken, reprogrammed, tortured until it fits in.

What is interesting is how agreeable this solution is to almost everyone involved. The book says of Helmholtz Watson:

"Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. 'I should like a thoroughly bad climate,' he answered. 'I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example.'"

This is a parody of the artisan, who thrives of pain and discomfort. But of course, there is no way to act without first feeling discomfort, or discontent. Discontent is the sensation that the world is not right; that there is some different state that would be better.

And that's what the urge to create is. An artisan--a painter, say--looks at something beautiful, but is not content. They feel that there is some response that is necessary, and is not content until that response is issued (like a capacitor, building up charge and waiting for a single moment of release). In the painter's case, the responsive urge is to create; thus the painter is an artisan-creator.

Another artisan--a conservationist, say--would look at that same mountain, and would not be content either. The conservationist would imagine hikers ruining the mountain, or an industrial plant dumping waste onto it. And the conservationist would create a society to get the mountain protected, saving the beauty for ages. Thus a conservationist is an artisan-maintainer.

Artisan-creators: here I'm unifying not just the conventional artists, but everyone who creates something new rather than just maintaining what exists. A computer programmer who comes up with new algorithms and computing strategies rather than just programming the way you were taught; a research doctor rather than a GP.

I don't mean to put artisan-creators in a higher category than, say, the artisan-maintainer (a groundskeeper, a GP). But the artisan-maintainer comes from a different impulse. The artisan-maintainer must be looking at the good, and must feel that it is in danger--it is, at the heart, a conservative urge (in the non-partisan sense of 'conservative'). An artisan-maintainer in the arts, for instance, might be one of those Shakespeare scholars who are always attempting to return to the ur-Shakespeare, the original Hamlet or Macbeth. The artisan-creator, on the other hand, can be seen in one of those twisted reinterpretations. And there is no reason why these two cannot be united (I think that Patrick Stewart's Macbeth was a unification these two approaches in a productive way; bringing new things to the text without throwing out the parts of the play which work).

So the artisan-creator is motivated by discontent with absence, the desire to excise the chaff and bring in more wheat. And the artisan-maintainer is motivated by a defensive fear on behalf of what already exists--the role of the Controller in Brave New World or O'Brien in 1984; the curator of a restoration society or a documenter.

Could an artisan be motivated by contentment? I don't think so. Because if someone felt true happiness, true contentment, there would be nothing to do. We are motivated to action by our discontent.

The lawmaker (as opposed to a politician) is motivated by the desire to see a better set of laws. You cannot think that America is perfect and does not require alteration and still write new laws. Something is not operating correctly, and you move to correct it in that law.

The happier we are, the more passive we are. Because we have to change less, we are less discontented. There is no reason to take a walk because we can be happy enough in our own home; there is no reason to create because we can buy the things we'd like to create. We work because without money we'd be discontent again--unable to provide to ourselves the things which make us happy.

And yet an artisan can be created from happy circumstances. But the artisan remains discontented, even in situations that others would be happy in. An artisan-creator can be born in the "idyllic suburbs" and can spend his life creating mockingly anti-capitalist work. Something makes him discontent. And others, who are content, will become irritated with that work, because his work increases their discontent.

The artisan-creator, or the artisan-maintainer, should not have the aim to spread discontent, however. This would be rather like a satirist trying to make worse government so he'll have more to poke fun at (something Jon Stewart has been accused of, and which he disavows). But they cannot lose touch with their own discontent, or they will lose grip over what makes their art.

I forget where I saw it, but there was some playwright who wrote that underneath everything--even the comedy--there is a current of vicious anger at the way the world is, an insistent demand that the world be different. That's the discontent that fuels even the most beautiful poetry.