Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (60 page)
Although purportedly secular, the public
educational
system exhibits this same antirational bias. Rand suggested that modern
education
has internalized the “ideology of socialization (in a neo-fascist form)” which was “floating, by default, through the vacuum of our intellectual and cultural atmosphere.”
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Rand characterized modern educators as “the comprachicos” of the mind. Adopting this phrase from Hugo’s
Man Who Laughs
, Rand explains that the comprachicos bought and sold children. They made the children into physical monstrosities, degrading and deforming them to complete “the task of political suppression.”
The comprachicos of the mind degrade and deform the child’s cognitive faculty toward the same end. From the very earliest moments of his
education
, the child is stunted by “militantly anti-cognitive and anti-conceptual”
pedagogical methods, through rote memorization, repetition, and concrete-bound association, rather than understanding, isolation of essentials, or conceptual integration. A premium is placed on social adaptation and adjustment, inculcating “the supremacy of the pack.” In
Rand
’s view, the Progressive nursery schools do not foster independent thinking. They attempt to socialize the child into conformity. And yet they defeat the very possibility of genuine social integration, since it is only “the thinking child” who is “fit for social relationships.” In elevating “the rule of mediocrity,” the system undermines the child’s intelligence and autonomy. Such pedagogical methods fuel fear and self-doubt and reproduce within education an “Establishment of Envy.” The child’s self-doubt pertains to a fundamental uncertainty over the efficacy of his mind and the rightness of his actions. The adults, teachers, and class “goons” in a child’s life contribute to his “moral emasculation.”
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It must be remembered that Rand was intimately aware of Progressive “activity methods of teaching.” In her youth, at the university, she witnessed the disastrous results as the
Petrograders
of Narkompros introduced Deweyite pedagogy into class instruction. While much of the disarray was to be blamed on how poorly many instructors were oriented to the Progressive credo, Rand believed that these methods were fundamentally anti-conceptual. But she also credited herself with being able to rise above the chaos.
Rand recognized, however, that not all children are as fortunate, especially those who are victimized by Progressive pedagogy from an early age. The child’s “early programming may become indelible at a certain point,” such that it becomes nearly impossible for the child to master the complex skills that his existence requires.
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As such, the child attempts to quell his own self-doubt by following the rituals and beliefs of the group as a guide to action. His loyalty is primarily to the group and to its members, not to ideas or to principles. The group binds all of its members “by the same concretes.”
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It is such anti-conceptual tribalism that serves as the psycho-epistemological root of pressure-group warfare, especially in its racist incarnations.
Rand argued that the
educational
“system is self-perpetuating: it leads to many vicious circles.”
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As the student moves into the higher grades, his concrete-bound methods of functioning are matched by an equally concrete-bound, compartmentalized curriculum. The curriculum militates against system-building and the integration of knowledge.
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But the teachers are not much better off than the students, since they too, are “products of the same educational system in its earlier stages.”
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As Branden (1994) emphasizes, many of these teachers “lack either the self-esteem or the training or
both to do their jobs properly. These are teachers who do not inspire but humiliate. They do not speak the language of courtesy and respect but of ridicule and sarcasm” (202).
In the universities, the anti-cognitive,
anti-conceptual
methods are perpetuated.
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The major difference is that on this level of education, the students are spoon-fed
theories
of modern
philosophy
that provide an intellectual sanction for their own stunted cognitive skills. Rand saw the universities as the source and center of contemporary “philosophical corruption.”
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She explained: “Whether the theories of modern philosophy serve merely as a screen, a defense-mechanism, a rationalization of neurosis or are, in part, its cause—the fact remains that modern philosophy has destroyed the best in these students and fostered the worst.”
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The universities continue the policy of educational fragmentation and intellectual disintegration, as each course requires the students to master a different language and method of thinking. With each subject tom from the larger context, the material that is taught in one class frequently contradicts the lessons of another (251).
The educational and economic systems reinforce each others’ “moral nihilism … range-of-the-moment pragmatism … [and] anti-ideological ideology” (254).
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The concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality serves a useful function in the maintenance of
power
relations on the structural level (Level 3). Those who function by means of disconnected concretes do not question the principle of government control, but only “the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character of government officials.”
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They accept as self-evident the premise that the government will solve social and economic problems, “somehow.” Rand writes: “As Nathaniel Branden pointed out in a lecture, ‘
somehow
’ always means ‘
somebody.
’”
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The epistemological method of the modern
statist
focuses on “single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues,” militating against any consideration of basic principles or long-term consequences. The purpose of this anti-integrative, “verbal fog” is to obscure the predatory nature of state power.
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The ultimate product of American education was the “archetypical citizen of a mixed economy: the docile, pliable, moderate Milquetoast who never gets excited, never makes trouble, never cares too much, adjusts to anything and upholds nothing.”
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Given this scathing attack on the staleness of contemporary American
education
and its relationship to the statist Establishment, it seemed odd that Rand would express an equally venomous hostility toward those who
did
get excited and
did
make trouble—the student rebels of the 1960s. Rand did not condemn the activists for their excitement; she believed that their
goals were fundamentally misguided. Her analysis of the student movement is distinctive, both methodologically and historically.
Rand criticized the student movement for its acceptance of Hegelian and Marxian theoretical constructs;
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however, Rand recognized that many students ran to the Marxist camp because it was more intellectual and systematized than its social science counterparts (N. Branden 1989, 47). She claimed that if the students had been offered the
Wall Street Journal
and Southern racism as examples of capitalist politics, they were correct to sense hypocrisy and to move further to the left.
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But the
New Left
did not embrace the more reputable Marxist synthesis, which had retained some respect for reason, science, and technology. The New Leftists rejected ideological labels, and proclaimed the supremacy of emotionalism and immediate action. Nourished on a poisonous diet of Kantianism, pragmatism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and existentialism, the New Left mounted an anti-ideological assault on a system that was fundamentally anti-ideological as well.
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Methodologically, Rand’s critique of the New Left was profoundly
dialectical
. Rand refused to detach even a seemingly radical rebellion from the social totality in which it emerged. The New Left was as much an outgrowth of the antirational as the culture it had rejected. While the “hippies” were to be commended for their repudiation of the Establishment, they failed to recognize their own place in it. The students were the “most consistently docile” archetypes of the System they condemned. They had internalized every major premise of the liberal Establishment and every major tenet of the altruist morality. Their rebellion was a symptom of “cultural disintegration … bred not in the slums, but in the universities.” They were, by and large, “middle-class savages.”
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For Rand, the counterculture, like the culture-at-large, had celebrated the superiority of faith, emotion, and instinct. In their indiscriminate, promiscuous, group sexual activity, and in their efforts to merge the self with the communal herd, there was but another manifestation of the cultural collectivism that had seeped into the pores of the social totality. Their use of
drugs
was an attempt to escape from their own unbearable inner lives, a “quest for a deliberately induced insanity” that invalidated their rational faculties.
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Rand proclaimed: “They are the distilled essence of the Establishment’s culture, they are the embodiment of its soul, they are the personified
ideal
of generations of crypto-Dionysians now leaping into the open.”
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This characterization of the New Left counterculture as “crypto-Dionysian” gives us a further clue into Rand’s historical savvy. As I suggested in
Chapter 1
, Rand had witnessed the same emotionalist, orgiastic, Dionysian elements in the Russian Symbolist movement of the Silver Age. In their exaltation of the cultic loss of self, the
Symbolists
had internalized the flagrant mysticism and collectivism of the Russian cultural milieu. Despite a revolutionary aesthetic, the Symbolists reflected their Russian roots. In Rand’s view, the New Left was no different. It was a pure by-product of its cultural context.
On Level 1 and Level 2 of her analysis of power relations, Rand had traced the broad effects of psychological, ethical, linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical practices on the autonomy and efficacy of the individual. Rand saw these factors in terms of their organic conjunction; each was both a precondition and a consequence of the other. Her dialectical sensibility helped her to project an all-encompassing, multilevel, non-Marxist, radical resolution. But Rand’s task was not complete. In challenging the implicit, antirational premises at work in modern
culture
, Rand mounted a simultaneous assault on the explicit antirational economic, social, and political structures and policies of the modern predatory state.
On Level 3 of her analysis, Rand focused on the
relations
of
power
as mediated through statist structures and processes. She emphasized the role of the predatory state in perpetuating
social
dualism
and
fragmentation
. She recognized that power relations at this level simultaneously incorporate and depend on the interpersonal and cultural conditions she explored on Levels 1 and 2.
THE MIXED ECONOMY
It must be remembered that Rand’s political
theory
was an attempt to enunciate and defend the underlying social principles of
capitalism
. The capitalist system, ideally understood, was based on the volitional exchange of
values
. Within such a system, “economic power is exercised by means of a
positive
, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value” for their labors.
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In a pure capitalist system, Rand saw no inherent dualism between the state and the market. She rejected the anarchist resolution because it reified a dualism between state and market that was historically specific to
statism
. Individualist
anarchists
typically sought resolution by proposing the market’s absorption of all political functions.
The anarchists were responding, no doubt, to the brutality of
statism
. Statism had created a violent antagonism between state and market. It sought to reconcile their opposition by the complete political absorption of the economic sphere. The organizing social principle of statism was
“political power,” which “is exercised by means of a
negative
, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.” The trader deals in a market of values, but the statist deals in fear, authority, and obedience (48). In Rand’s view, statism concentrates extensive economic, political, and social controls in the state at the expense of individual
rights
. It is the negation of every rational and moral principle of social organization. It is a structural formation of legalized looting, “a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war, that leaves men no choice but to fight to seize power over one another.”
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As a twentieth-century social critic, Rand witnessed some of the most flagrant state brutality in human history. In keeping with her revolt against formal dualism, Rand opposed both
fascism
and
communism
as “two variants of the same political system.” Despite their apparent ideological and sociological differences, both systems were fundamentally statist. They enslaved the poor and expropriated the rich “in favor of a ruling clique.” The struggle between fascists and communists and each of their political derivatives obscured the central issue of contemporary politics, the clash not between rich and poor, but between the individual and the state, between
capitalism
and statism.
While Rand did not live to see the death of communism, she was convinced that the danger to the West lay within. For Rand, Soviet communism was morally, culturally, and economically bankrupt. The West’s social, economic, and political crises were not an outgrowth of external clashes with the Eastern bloc, but of its own internal contradictions, its attempt to combine elements of freedom and slavery under the rubric of the so-called, “mixed” economy. Rand argued: “A mixed economy is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements, which cannot remain stable, but must ultimately go one way or the other.”
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