Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (59 page)

Rand recognized that intellectuals and
artists
constituted a small minority in any given national population. In the case of the United States, Rand saw a stark contrast between the purveyors of
culture
(Tier 2) and the people, specifically, between the intellectuals’ and artists’ sense of life and the predominating sense of life of the American people (Tier 1). This conflict can be better understood when placed in a horizontal relationship with the individual sphere.

On Tier 3, a
society
’s political and economic policies correspond to an individual’s course of
action
. They are not implemented in a vacuum. Just as an individual’s course of action cannot be abstracted from his
conscious
convictions, so a society’s political and economic policies cannot be abstracted from its
cultural
trends. Thus, on Tier 2, the culture, as manifested in explicit intellectual and artistic products, is analogous to an individual’s conscious convictions. The culture embodies a society’s dominant philosophy.

On Tier 1, Rand created an analogy between the nation’s sense of life as expressed in its “lifestyle,” and the individual’s sense of life. The nation’s “lifestyle” is represented in its predominating social practices and attitudes, which constitute a general emotional atmosphere, an integrated encapsulation of the values that most people hold.
⁵⁶
These practices and attitudes serve “as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.”
⁵⁷
It becomes possible to identify “national characteristics” because the great majority of people will tacitly absorb and express values, attitudes, and traditions that have been habitually reproduced by successive generations. They tend to develop “the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy” from the earliest impressions of their childhood.
⁵⁸

Branden has echoed this Randian view. He argues that if one does not overtly identify accepted cultural values and practices, one cannot call these into question, “precisely because they are absorbed by a process that largely by-passes the conscious mind.” Branden maintains that such a “cultural
unconscious”
⁵⁹
encompasses implicit beliefs about nature, reality,
human
beings, masculinity and femininity, good and evil. These beliefs reflect the context of a given historical time and place. Though there will be ideational differences among people within a specific
culture
, Branden argues “that at least some of these beliefs tend to reside in every psyche in a given society, and without ever being the subject of explicit awareness” (287–88). Recognizing that “cultures do not encourage the questioning of their own premises,” Branden, like Rand, grasps the crucial necessity of critical thinking in the struggle for personal and
social
change (303).

Rand emphasized that a society, like an individual, will tend to see its inarticulate beliefs, practices, and attitudes (Tier 1) as natural and self-evident. But these beliefs cannot be reified; they must be analyzed as by-products of complex evaluations made by many people over a long period of time and reflecting a fundamental view of
human
nature.
⁶⁰
Just as Rand aimed for the
articulation
of values and attitudes within each individual as a means toward his or her
rational
integration or alteration, so too, did she aim to grasp a society’s implicit values and attitudes as a means toward their explicit articulation or transcendence.

Rand argued that within both the individual and social spheres, there can be a pronounced conflict between
tacit
and articulated dimensions, between Tier 1 and Tiers 2 and 3. The social world, like the individual’s inner world, is not constituted by a hegemonic unity; it is frequently a sphere in
contradiction
with itself. She wrote:

Just as an individual’s
sense of life
can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious values—so is a nation. (252)

The political trend (Tier 3) in the United States is statist. Its cultural trend (Tier 2) is “directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty.”
⁶¹
The prime psychological effect of Tiers 3 and 2 on most people is “the erosion of
ambition
.” In Rand’s view, the political goal presupposes these two dominant cultural and psychological tendencies.
Statism
requires docility, hopelessness, and stagnation. Since “thinking men cannot be ruled,” and since “ambitious men do not stagnate,” statism had to institutionalize the antirational.
⁶²
Whereas previously there had been an Age of Reason and
an Age of Enlightenment, contemporary U.S.
culture
had brought about an Age of Envy, which expressed “
hatred of the
good
for being the good.
”
⁶³
In nearly every aspect of culture, a fundamental malevolence sought to annihilate every desirable human good
because
it was good. In the Age of Envy, there was a social function to every cultural idea that opposed success or ambition.

The
egalitarian
-intellectuals, for instance, attacked human uniqueness and turned “equality … into an
anti-concept
.” They switched its meaning from a political to a metaphysical context, and proposed to invalidate the physical and spiritual distinctions among individuals through the coercive power of the state. In actuality, they wished to achieve “an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top
—the aristocracy of non-value
” (165). Such policies penalized the truly intelligent. But they also destroyed every individual, “each in proportion to his intelligence.” Under such conditions, the average person did not possess the genius’s resilience and self-confidence, and was much more apt to abdicate his mind, “in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.”
⁶⁴

The modern egalitarians seek to replace self-responsibility and earned achievement with a psychology of entitlement and victimization based on claims of illusory rights and metaphysical equality (N. Branden 1994, 297–305). Their ultimate weapon is the altruist morality. Rand argued: “It makes no difference whether they embraced altruism as a means to their ulterior motives or the motives grew out of their altruistic creed.” These “two elements are mutually reinforcing.”
⁶⁵
Even if the egalitarians’ motivations were sincere, their doctrine of self-sacrifice, self-immolation, and self-abnegation inculcated a sense of guilt and worthlessness in other people. Historically, philosophically, and psychologically, altruism was used as a rationalization “for the most evil motives, the most inhuman actions, the most loathsome emotions.”
⁶⁶

However, Rand believed that the nation’s “sense of life,” upheld by the majority of Americans (Tier 1), was in stark contradiction to this primordial cultural-intellectual trend. Though most Americans had “mixed” premises, they had internalized a fundamentally Aristotelian sense of life that was reality-oriented, progressive, technological, and defiant. But the United States could not long survive on the basis of a tacit benevolence. Without the full articulation and objective definition of rational values, American society was doomed.
⁶⁷
Its sense of life (Tier 1) was gradually being corrupted in an atmosphere of explicit cultural (Tier 2), and political (Tier 3)
irrationality
as manifested in most social institutions and practices.

Rand’s critique duplicates the comprehensive, integrated character of the Marxian analysis of
culture
. Certainly there is an important distinction
in emphasis: Rand saw
social
phenomena in terms of their philosophical roots, whereas Marx focused on their material roots. Yet both thinkers examine the extent to which a dominant philosophical or material mode is reproduced in nearly every aspect of social life.
⁶⁸
Rand presented a view of systemic
irrationality
that encompasses everything from art and religion to politics and pedagogy.

In many ways, Rand’s approach bears an even closer resemblance to the vision of
Antonio Gramsci
, the Italian Marxist. Gramsci (1971) argued that philosophy (or culture), politics, and economics “are the necessary constituent elements of the same conception of the world, [hence] there must necessarily be, in their
theoretical
principles, a convertibility from one to the others and a reciprocal translation into the specific language of each constituent element. Any one is implicit in the others, and the three together form a homogeneous circle” (403).

Gramsci developed an expansive definition of
power
relations
that was reflected in each of the constituents he identified. He maintained that the phenomenon of power pervaded all social structures and institutions. As a Marxist, Gramsci developed the concept of
“hegemony”
to describe how capitalist relations achieved predominance in both the political and social spheres of action. He emphasized that power structures were not exclusively state formations. Most of them, in fact, reside in “civil society.” The “ideological state apparatuses” include institutions of religion, education, family, law, communication, and culture, as well as political parties and trade unions, all of which are expressive of “bourgeois” power relations. His vision of proletarian revolution required the formation of parallel institutions, a “counter-hegemony,” or “bloc of historical forces,” which would develop “within the womb of the old society,” negating every manifestation of capitalist relations. This was not primarily a “top-down” political revolution, but a “bottom-up” cultural transformation.
⁶⁹

Like Gramsci, Rand grasped the expansive nature of power relations. She recognized the presence of oppressive forces in
culture
, politics, and economics and believed too that any genuine revolution in the political sphere would be preceded necessarily by a cultural renaissance. Unlike Gramsci, however, Rand argued that it was not capitalist hegemony that needed to be transcended.
Capitalism
was an unknown ideal, a
social
system not fully realized, undermined by antirational, ancient cultural practices. The aesthetic images in the contemporary “mixed” economy were a “
concretized
reality” of the tribalist and
mystic
philosophical premises at work in modern culture.
⁷⁰
For Rand, “Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the
conceptual
level of man’s
consciousness
and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so
modern
art
and
literature
are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the ‘enjoyment’ of meaningless colors, noises and moods” (97).

The culture mirrored such philosophical bankruptcy. In literature and motion pictures, writers had dispensed with structured plot progression. They were unconcerned with projecting an ideal man or woman, and frequently presented a clash between two variations of evil. The antihero became the central focus. In modern music, atonalism replaced melody and harmony. Mindless sounds and noises were introduced into composition as a deliberate attack on musical integration and structure.
⁷¹
In painting and sculpture, artists presented formless blotches of a nonobjective and nonrepresentational nature.
⁷²
They distorted perspective, space, shape, color, and the human figure.

In the face of such cultural nihilism, Rand believed that the individual was deprived “of conceptual stimulation and communication.” There was an absence of “value experiences” in modern culture that had the effect of lowering human expectations under the pressure of an omnipresent
irrationality
.
⁷³
In such a cultural context, many people turned to
religion
as a panacea. Rand recognized that “mystic fantasies” helped to explain those things which people failed to understand.
⁷⁴
But even in contemporary religion, Rand saw the progressive abandonment of rational, Thomistic theology in favor of fundamentalism, cults, astrology, and reincarnation.
⁷⁵
Most people respond to mysticism out of loneliness, hurt, and pain, eager to find inspiration in a moral ideal projected in the God-concept. Tragically, such people view existence as hopeless. They doubt their own efficacy and become victims of what Branden called a mystic “protection racket,” which fuels people’s fear of death—and of life on earth.
⁷⁶
But faith was no antidote. It was, in Branden’s view, “a tool of distortion”; religion by its nature fostered a bias against the mind.
⁷⁷