Normally in Position Papers we try to show-case books worth reading; this month – unusually – we’re showcasing an author who is not at all worth reading: Ayn Rand. Not that she is immensely popular any longer, at least over on this side of the Atlantic, and I wonder if she ever was. But her novels Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead formed part of a intellectual movement promoting a Nietzschean individualism which echoes down to more recent times in writers such as Richard Dawkins. For them “greed is good” and “the individual is everything”.
Ayn Rand’s brand of radical individualism was fed in part by her studies of Nietzsche as a university student in post-revolution Petrograd and in part as a reaction against the tyrannical statism of the Marxists (who confiscated her father’s business soon after the October Revolution). As Josh Herring attests in his article below, Rand’s juvenile philosophical libertarianism is still able to exert a profound influence especially on younger readers. Herring himself was able to see through and shake off her siren song: “By the time I graduated from college, I developed different views: financial freedom is a means, not an end; the greatest hope for human happiness lies in being deeply rooted in a community of people; the ability of an individual to build wealth depends on social systems that undergird intentional actions, creating an obligation to steward those systems and pass them on to the next generation.”
This theme of individualism is a thread running through several of our reviews. Fr James Schall, in The Politics of Heaven and Hell, reviewed here by James Bradshaw, shows how Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a key figure in the evolution of radical evolution through his transference of evil tout court from the individual person to social entities: “No longer is evil seen as a resultant from the choices of responsible, fallen human persons in their historical ambiguities, but evil has been incarnate, something classical Christianity never attributed to it. Classes, nations, beliefs are the ‘causes’ of evil and must be rejected in toto, since, we are told, there can be no compromise with it in its visible form.”
We find the questions of radical individualism popping up in James Bradshaw’s review of Sohrab Ahmari’s latest book The Unbroken Thread. Ahmari himself, in his journey from Islam to Catholicism, passed through a period of standard Western hedonism and radical individualism (in part inspired also by his fervent reading of Nietzsche as he recounts in the story of his conversion Through Fire, By Water). He now fears that Western individualistic hedonism will be the lifestyle adopted in time by his infant son Max. This leads him to look to the wisdom of our predecessors, a kind of “democracy of the dead”, for alternatives to our current Nietzschean self-absorption: “I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated or ‘limiting’ can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound,” he writes. (Incidentally I’d like to add my own personal recommendation for this wonderful book).
We find a theological rendering of this same theme in Msgr Joseph Murphy’s Christ Our Joy: The Theological Vision of Pope Benedict reviewed here by Margaret Hickey. Here we are reminded that the lure of absolute autonomy is nothing new; it long predates Rand, Nietzsche and Rousseau and goes all the way back to the beginning – to original sin – and can only be remedied by a return to the God we have forsaken: “Like Adam we crave a false freedom and autonomy that leads merely to servitude. Our real freedom is found in dependence on God, who created us in love and for love and offers us ‘life to the full’ (John 10:10) through the greatest outpouring of his love in the death of Jesus on the cross. Jesus, whose life was wholly united with the divine will, asked his apostles to pray as he prayed using the words Luke gives to Jesus in Gethsemane, ‘Thy will be done…’.”
Given that nobody can live in a hermetically sealed bubble and the influences of our surrounding environment are constantly seeping in to us, how much are we Catholics affected by selfish individualism? Not that it requires the influence of outside forces to turn us into egoists – original sin will see to that. If I may say something a bit provocative here, but perhaps the Covid virus has exposed something a bit Nietzschean in us. The Covid pandemic is an object lesson in the fact that “no man is an island” in the immortal words of John Donne. Here is the quote in full:
No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were;
any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Covid has dramatically demonstrated that “I am involved in mankind”. From the person who first contracted (or elaborated?!) Covid 19 in Wuhan, to the person who passed it on to me, or the person to whom I in turn passed it on, we have all been intensely, dramatically, even fatally involved in mankind over the past two years. For most of us our worst nightmare was that we might unwittingly pass on the virus to a vulnerable person for whom it might prove fatal. There are things I must think about “because I am involved in mankind”. And this leads us to the question of vaccinations. A person may of course have legitimate qualms of conscience about receiving a vaccine whose development made use of foetal cells obtained through abortion. A person may have legitimate reservations about State over-reach in mandating vaccination. But such objections do not dispense us from a duty towards others, to consider that these objections do not absolve me of my duty of care to those around me. It is now reported that five million deaths can be attributed to Covid. For Donne at least, the bells have tolled five million times for you.