Mark Tooley’s article, “Choosing Ayn Rand or Jesus,”
posted on this site yesterday, makes depressing reading, but
given the miserable intellectual state of religious leftism, is not
particularly surprising.
Ayn Rand’s work can, indeed, be regarded as a Christian
heresy, like Marxism. Like nearly all Judeo-Christian heresies,
these take one aspect of Judeo-Christianity, or one of the values
held by good people in general, necessary in itself and in its
place, and try to inflate it into a complete new system.
Looking at Ayn Rand, Judeo-Christian thought has always
accepted the idea of individualism, as it has accepted the idea of
the worth of every individual soul. It was this that led
Christianity, alone among the major religions, to abolish slavery
in a political-religious campaign lasting thousands of
years.
Christianity held that every individual, possessing an
immortal soul, was of vast importance and value. Hence, when that
fierce disciplinarian the Duke of Wellington found a common soldier
in front of him at a church-parade, he reassured the cowering and
terrified private with the words: “We are all equal here, my
man.”
This importance given to each individual is something Ayn
Rand , even according to her own doctrines, need not have quarreled
with. But Christianity was also the first religion to go in for
altruism on a large scale – one of its first activities, after it
was made legal by the Roman Emperor Constantine, was to see that
each diocese had a public hospital. Before this some hospitals had
existed but they had been scattered, spasmodic, one-off affairs.
Christianity also instituted the care of orphans, who previously
had frequently been left to perish, and set up whole orders devoted
to caring for the poor and sick. The Western Science of which Ayn
Rand was proud (she suggested the first men on the moon should have
declared: “What hath Man wrought!” was a product of
Christianity.
The amazing genius of Christianity meant it could be all
things to all people, and could accommodate quite different states
of mind without losing its central premises: pacifists as well as
crusaders could be Christian, scientists as well as mystics,
philosophers as well as yokels. It founded the first real modern
universities.
There had been nothing like this among Mankind’s religions
on Earth before. Thus, to state there is some kind of choice
between Ayn Rand and Christianity, while in a sense true, is really
very little more than a silly and childish statement of the
obvious. It is equally true, though the leftist churches won’t be
saying this, that there is a choice between Christianity and the
heresy of Marxism.
Ayn Rand did have a few worthwhile things to say. A
paraphrase of the most sensible part of her message might be that
the creators of wealth and prosperity are, provided of course that
they are honest, doing something necessary and honorable; she also
warned, quite eloquently and accurately against Marxism, as the
inflation of altruism under an idealistic cloak leading at length
to the Gulag. At schools and colleges where no alternative to
leftist writers are offered on reading lists, bootleg copies of her
work may act as “ice-breakers” of the leftist monopoly, leading the
enquiring student on to better things.
Mark Tooley quotes a leftist religious network: “GOP
leaders and conservative pundits have brought upon themselves a
crisis of values,” the network explains. “Many who for years have
been the loudest voices invoking the language of faith and moral
values are now praising the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand whose
teachings stand in direct contradiction to the Bible.” The
political agenda behind this seems obvious. Substitute a name like
“Sojourners” or “The World Council of Churches” for “GOP leaders
and conservative pundits” and “Karl Marx” for “Ayn Rand,” and the
point becomes not only obvious but true.
Of course, Ayn Rand was a crank. It is neither desirable
nor possible to swallow the whole of her message, even assuming it
was consistent. She was, like Marx, one of the “great simplifiers”
that Edmund Burke warned against, and her work has more in common
with that of Marx than the disciples of either should feel
comfortable about. The best of what she had to say was said more
elegantly and intelligently by Adam Smith in the 18th
century, by von Hayek in “The Road to Serfdom,” or any
number of other writers in the classic economic
tradition.
The point is that it is possible to take the best of what
she had to say and discard the rest, without the moral bullying and
hectoring of the Christian Left or anyone else. The same point
could be made about far greater philosophers.
