I’m not a trained, licensed philosopher, so and I don’t have much time (not even time to read it all) but I do have a few quick reactions to Will Wilkinson’s latest Letter to A Young Objectivist. Wilkinson’s argument seems to be that when Rand says that a morality of reason is necessary for man’s survival, that isn’t true, because you can see all around you that there are many people who live and who are not rational. Isn’t this rather like saying that alcoholism isn’t really bad because there are lots of alcoholics who aren’t dead—and even ones who accomplish big things?
I could exaggerate somewhat and say that when Wilkinson claims that parasitism is stable, that’s rather like the proverbial man who jumps off the Empire State Building and says, on his way past the 25th floor, “So far, so good.” Parisitism as a personal psychology, is stable only as socialism, as an economics, is stable—at the expense of behaviors which are incompatible with proper morality, and which involve costs no person, or society, should pay.
Now, that’s not saying that every parasite is unhappy. Ignorance is bliss, for one thing, and I think a representative of every morality has to say that. Also, happiness is sort of like the “phenotypic” consequence of a whole bunch of “genotypic” factors. A bureaucrat at HUD might be a happy person because he is a basically rational person who engages in the behaviors that Objectivism considers virtues—even though his life may include contradictions, and his happiness may be mixed.
I’m also rather startled by the statement that “among the main reasons to admire capitalism is that we need to discover and produce almost nothing we need. The system, the network of market institutions, practically ensures my survival.” That’s just not right. It’s true that, due to Say’s Law, the wealth of a free society will be so great as to make it much easier for even the poorest and least skilled person in the society to survive, but to say that the “system” will “ensure my survival” is reification on a grand scale. You could say “I don’t have to drive, because the freeway system practically ensures my arrival at my destination.” Wilkinson sees this flaw because he goes on to say “I need only find some kind of gainful employment.” Exactly. The “system” is just a shorthand way of referring to the productive energy of people. And that’s what Rand is referring to. And it has to be more than “gainful” simply in the sense of producing wages; if all the workers in the country started just digging holes and filling them back up again, we would soon all be impoverished. Flourishing isn’t automatic—it’s the result of behaviors, and those behaviors are productivity and intellectual engagement. That seems to be what Rand is saying.
I agree that Rand’s greatest flaw is her rhetorical style, which, while very attractive to some, is also very much a deterrent to others. I also agree that Objectivist thinkers need to work more on evolution. Obviously I don’t agree that reason is cultural, but I think the tendency to imagine it as just a wholly-formed thing that has been handed down to us as is—or the tendency to think in the style of the “Cartesean Theater”—is a weakness in some Objectivists I meet. As I’ve written, however, I don’t think Objectivism has anything to fear at all from philosophers like Daniel Dennett or Larry Arnhart, who are working on these problems.
