Why Ayn Rand Won't Go Away and the Motor of Moral Psychology

[ValueSleuth]

The below blog post on Atlas Shrugged Part 2, there in an interesting presentation on the author's take on the underpinnings of the US 2-party system and why it would be very difficult to get a viable, competitive 3rd party into the mix.  Link:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sh...61288.html

"So when you see the Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, remember that this is far more than a film or a story about a railroad and a mysterious motor. It is a vehicle to get us to think about which moral principles we value the most, because as Ayn Rand believed, it is ideas that move the world."

VS

Why Ayn Rand Won't Go Away: 'Atlas Shrugged,' Part 2 and the Motor of Moral Psychology

Posted: 10/12/2012 12:22 pm

After seeing the Los Angles premiere of Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, the film that opens today based on the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand (and with an entirely new cast and higher production value, a vast improvement over Part 1), a question struck me as I was exiting the theater surrounded by Hollywood types most commonly stereotyped as liberal: Why don't liberals admire Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism, so forcefully presented in this book and film?

It is not a mystery that the woman who called herself a "radical for capitalism" would be embraced by some conservatives such as Paul Ryan and Ron Paul, but why do liberals not recognize that Rand was also a champion of individual rights, was outspoken against racism, bigotry and discrimination against minorities, and most notably was ahead of her time in championing women's rights and demonstrating through her novels (and films) that women are as smart as men, as tough-minded as men, as hard-working as men, as ambitious as men, and can even run an industrial enterprise as good as if not better than men?

In the teeth of a 2010 study that revealed Hollywood still discriminates against women when it comes to roles in films, most notably the number and length of speaking parts and the continued blatant sexuality in which women show far more skin than men but speak far less, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggert (played by Samantha Mathis in the new film), has the most speaking roles (and shows almost no skin), runs her own transcontinental railroad, handles with ease both seasoned male politicians and hard-nosed male titans of industry, and embodies courage and character deserving of respect and admiration from women and men, liberals and conservatives.

An answer may be found in the fact that American politics is a duopoly of those who tend toward being either fiscally and socially liberal or fiscally and socially conservative. Rand's fiscal conservatism and social liberalism fits into neither camp comfortably (and is mostly commonly associated with the Libertarian party). As well, the moral psychology behind the political duopoly leads people to either believe that moral principles are absolute and universal or that they are relative and cultural. Rand's implacable absolutism on moral issues, especially her seemingly cold-hearted fiscal conservatism, more comfortably fits into the conservative camp, but even there only barely.

Consider a few correlations from my dataset of 34,371 Americans who took "The Morality Survey" (you can take it yourself here), constructed by myself and U.C. Berkeley social scientist Frank Sulloway and analyzed by my graduate students Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree: (1) We found a significant correlation (r=.29) between social conservatism and the belief that moral principles are absolute and universal (and between social liberalism and the belief that moral principles are relative and cultural), so Rand's philosophy does not match that of most Americans. (2) We found a significant correlation (r=.24) between fiscal conservatism and the belief that moral principles are absolute and universal (and the reverse for social liberalism), so fiscal liberals will not embrace Rand here. We also found a correlation (r=.27) between belief in God and belief that moral principles are absolute and universal, and here again Rand is an outlier as an atheist who firmly believed in absolute and universal moral principles (discoverable through reason, she believed). So for liberals, Rand's fiscal conservatism and moral principle absolutism trumps her social liberalism, and even for many on the right her atheism and rejection of faith calls into question her conservative bona fides.

Our duopolistic political system also explains why third parties in American politics -- from libertarians and tea partyers to progressives and green partyers -- cannot get a toehold. Despite Romney's 47 percent gaffe, in point of fact both candidates know that each will automatically receive about that percentage of the vote, leaving the final 6 percent up for grabs. Why are we so politically divided? One answer comes from the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill: "A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life."

But why would our political life be so configured? A deep evolutionary answer may be found in the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt's new book The Righteous Mind, in which he argues that to both liberal and conservative members of the other party are not just wrong; they are righteously wrong. Their errors are not just factual, but intentional, and their intentions are not just misguided, but dangerous. As Haidt explains, "Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife." Thus, he concludes, morality binds us together into cohesive groups but blinds us to the ideas and intentions of those in other groups.

Third parties and outliers like Rand fall into neither group and so are not even taken seriously. But why only two parties? According to Haidt, the answer is in our moral psychology and how liberals and conservatives differ in their emphasis on five moral foundations: (1) Harm/care, which underlies such moral virtues as kindness and nurturance; (2) Fairness/reciprocity, which leads to such political ideals of justice, rights, and individual autonomy; (3) Ingroup/loyalty, which creates within a tribe a "band-of-brothers" effect and underlies such virtues as patriotism; (4) Authority/respect, which lies beneath such virtues as esteem for law and order and respect for traditions; and (5) Purity/sanctity, which emphasizes the belief that the body is a temple that can be desecrated by immoral activities. Sampling hundreds of thousands of people Haidt found that liberals are higher than conservatives on 1 and 2 (Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity), but lower than conservatives on 3, 4, and 5 (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity), while conservatives are roughly equal on all five dimensions, although slightly higher on 3, 4, and 5 (you can take the survey here: www.yourmorals.org).

Obama's emphasis on caring for the poor and fairness across all socioeconomic classes appeals to liberals, whereas conservatives are drawn toward Romney's reinforcement of faith, family, nation, and tradition. Libertarians split the difference in being fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but their one-dimensional emphasis on individual freedom above all else (as in Rand's philosophy) leaves them devoid of political support.

So when you see the Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, remember that this is far more than a film or a story about a railroad and a mysterious motor. It is a vehicle to get us to think about which moral principles we value the most, because as Ayn Rand believed, it is ideas that move the world.

[admin]

Well, you're in good company here on SHU, Value. There are at least three or four fellow Randians here, I'm sure, perhaps more.

I have to admit I'm not too familiar with Ayn Rand's work (in Western Europe, she's not widely red) and I'm not one for absolute principles (I'm more of a "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" kind of guy) and I wasn't too impressed after reading what Jeff Sachs wrote about it, but perhaps that's not a fair rendition, I can't tell.

What I always found a little hard to reconcile is capitalism and conservatism. I mean, capitalism is the system for revolutionary change par excellence, it produces constant social upheaval that endanger vested interests tradition and stability on an ongoing basis. One of my favourite books is Daniel Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" describing how capitalism morphed from a system based on thrift, restraint and postponement of gratification but has bred a consumer culture that is the exact mirror image. It's difficult to match the quality and succinctness of The Economist, this is what they wrote when he died (and you Randians will like the part on the welfare state at the end):

Ahead of the curve

Daniel Bell, who died on January 25th, was one of the great sociologists of capitalism

Feb 3rd 2011 | from the print edition

ASKED what he specialised in, Daniel Bell replied: “generalisations”. Mr Bell lived a varied life. He grew up in New York City, so poor that he sometimes had to scavenge for food. Yet he ended his days in bourgeois comfort in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He spent 20 years as a journalist, mostly as Fortune's labour editor, before decamping to academia. His boss, Henry Luce, desperate to keep his star writer, asked him why he was leaving. He gave four reasons: June, July, August and September.

His taste for generalisations grew with the eating. He produced three of the great works of post-war sociology: “The End of Ideology” (1960), “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (1973) and “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978). On the Times Literary Supplement's list of the 100 most influential books since the second world war, two were by Mr Bell.

Many of Mr Bell's insights remain as relevant today as when he first broached them. For example, the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, which he chronicled in America decades ago, is now happening in China and India. Even when he was wrong, Mr Bell was wrong in thought-provoking ways. A few hours with his oeuvre is worth more than a week in Davos (and is less likely to cause skiing injuries).

“The End of Ideology” described the political landscape of the post-cold-war world 30 years before the cold war ended. Mr Bell argued that the great ideological struggles that had defined the first half of the 20th century were exhausted. The new politics, he said, would be about boring administration, not the clash of ideals. His timing could hardly have been worse: the 1960s was one of the most ideologically charged decades in American history. Nonetheless, Mr Bell was right that the ideology of communism was doomed. In China it has given way to market Leninism. In Russia it has been replaced by kleptocracy.

Mr Bell spent the next decade and a bit working on a huge book, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”, a term he coined and which caught on. Many of the book's insights—about the shift from manufacturing to services, the rise of knowledge workers and the waning of the class struggle—have now become so familiar that it is easy to forget how fresh they were in 1973. However, Mr Bell failed to spot one of the revolutions that was whirling around him: the transition from the managerial capitalism that he witnessed at Fortune to a much more freewheeling entrepreneurial capitalism. Perhaps this was the price he paid for spurning Luce and moving to academia.

Many of his other insights still bite. He argued that the old-fashioned class struggle was being replaced by other, equally vexatious conflicts: for example, between the principles of equality and meritocracy in higher education. He also anticipated the current debate about happiness by pointing out that material progress cannot eliminate the frustrations inherent in the zero-sum competition for power, prestige and the attention of the sexiest person in the room. The more people are free to rise on their own merits, the more they will race on the treadmill for status.

Mr Bell's best book was “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism”. In it he raised the possibility that the material abundance that capitalism produces might destroy the very virtues that had made capitalism possible in the first place. Capitalism, as Max Weber said, depends on the Puritan virtues of hard work, thrift and deferred gratification. But modern consumerism was stimulating the appetite for instant gratification and irrational self-expression, Mr Bell worried. The Protestant ethic was being destroyed by the shopping mall and the counter-culture.

This argument is not watertight. Despite Mr Bell's cultural contradictions and Karl Marx's economic contradictions, capitalism is still going strong. In “Bobos in Paradise” David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, argued that a cocktail of bourgeois virtues and bohemian values can prove economically invigorating. Some of the most successful companies in recent years have been founded by such un-Puritanical figures as Sir Richard Branson (Virgin), Steve Jobs (Apple) and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (Ben & Jerry's). High-tech companies such as Google have no difficulty in combining the profit motive with the ethos of a campus. But in one area Mr Bell was prescient: he worried that consumerism was encouraging people to borrow more money than they could reasonably hope to repay.

He was even more prescient about what might be called “the cultural contradictions of the welfare state”. This was the subject of passionate debate in the pages of the Public Interest, a journal he co-founded in 1965 with another poor-boy-made-good, Irving Kristol. The welfare state cannot last unless someone creates the wealth to pay for it. But interest groups demand ever more from the state, and politicians jostle to promise more goodies. As the welfare state expands, it can eventually undermine people's willingness to take risks or look after themselves.

Different strokes for different folks

One of Mr Bell's most provocative insights ran throughout his work. This was the idea that, contrary to what economic determinists such as Marx said, different “realms” of society could operate according to different principles. (Always wary of the neoconservative label that Kristol embraced with such enthusiasm, Mr Bell described himself as a “socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”.) Capitalism might co-exist just as happily with Chinese authoritarianism as with American democracy, he reckoned. In this, one hopes that the great polymath was wrong.

[admin]

Whilst surfing, I stumble upon a few Randian colonies being built as we speak (as well as an apparently awful film cyclus..)

http://business.time.com/2012/10/12/atlas-shrugonomics/

Honduras is a hell-house, caught in the crossfire of the war on drugs so things can hardly get worse there, but I like that idea of a ship docked in the harbor of San Francisco with foreign entrepreneurs. That really is imaginative thinking, one has to admit..

[Petrovale]

STP, perhaps the reason why Ayn Rand is not widely known or read in Europe, is because a number of EU governments actively discourage entrepreneurs to emigrate to an offshore Colorado in search of worthy development objectives.

1. Some governments will slam a huge retention claim on migrant working capital that contains deferred tax liabilities. When moving outside the EU, it often must be paid in full. The victim may be granted "pardon" when giving up his / her Galtian dream or when he / she has demonstrated "good behavior" during a period of 10 yrs.
2. In effect, the entrepreneurial emigrant is forced to remain a fiscal resident of the country which he / she has just chosen to abandon and is obliged to pay taxes there over income generated in Colorado. This, of course, is where Ayn Rand gets violated and John Galt's strike is defused. Once a servant of the state, always a servant of the state.
3. Of course, things can get very nasty when a military coup in Colorado establishes a new regime as ugly as the one that the emigrant elected to abandon. After all, for many states, levying taxes at the source is not enough; they also want a share of your worldwide income to play around at their favorite local destination.

I think more radical philosophers are about to arise and entrepreneurs will plan their revenge as Leviathan states reject Lockean alternatives, and continue screwing around with the allocation of private capital.

Best,

Petro

[admin]

But that's the US who still taxes their citizens even after they've left, I'm not aware of any European state doing that, Petro (but I might be wrong, I don't qualify as a tax expert..).

[Petrovale]

NL does the same...

[rare]

Nice post. I like it. Thanks for sharing these information. Keep it up.

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