One Cheer for Ayn

by James Como (April 2016)

Some fifty-five years ago – I would have been fourteen: the Yankees beat the Reds in a great World Series, great, that is, if you were a Yankee fan – I began my lamentable Ayn Rand mini-jag. I found her at a local shop on Broadway in Astoria, Queens, called the Patrick Henry Bookstore. My father was along, and when we left he warned me against the shop. A man of the moderate Right, he called it “fanatical,” largely owing to the ample display of John Birch Society material and of None Dare Call it Treason, a conspiracy screed if ever there was one. I bought that book, it proved my father right (according to it my Polish grandmother was suspect), and I never returned to the store (which closed soon after). 

An example. We’ve all heard some version of: “Just think of what the white man has done to the red man .” Some version, because you can replace the perpetrator with Europeans, Jews, Doctors, Police . . . .  I’m sure you get the point, in fact have gotten the point sufficiently for me not to have to provide alternatives for the victims. The proclamation simply does not permit of individuation: one is guilty, not by mere association but by being a particle included in some mass, as though my immigrant Italian grandfather had killed American Indians.  

Now, this enormity and so very many others reside in nothing more than a logical error known as the Fallacy of Composition, which assumes that all particles in a whole share the traits exhibited by that whole, e.g. all Americans must be rich since America is a rich country. So inviting, easy, and (for its apparent conclusivity) so comforting is this fallacy that even the great C. S. Lewis (my magister) was guilty of its perpetration: “I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black,” he writes in “Onward, Christian Spaceman.” There we have it. And there we can see how very many putative oppressors and their victims are thereby . . . not, and how much of our discourse depends on that fraudulence, and how much public policy and the weal that goes with it depends on that discourse. And how much civic enmity.

The antidote is an anthem of our own: being an individual, being individuated, existing (i.e. “standing out”) – and seeing each other similarly – and seeing through those who would disallow it. Some decades ago I was conversing with a run-of-the-mill New York Liberal colleague, a painter. There was some point of contention between us, but it was as yet inchoate in public discourse. I asked her position. Her answer: “I’ll have to find out what the Liberal position is before I can say” – a debased response. She would be part of Richard Rorty’s oh-so-pragmatic “us,” but not until she knew what the unindividuated hive believed (which is why I’m not a Conservative. Must I care, say, that Ted Cruz is the “real” Conservative running for the Republican nomination for president? Or should I care more that he recklessly voted against meta-data gathering?)

Of course, “standing out” has taken many forms, and as an antidote to “labeling,” to “lumping” together people as well as opinions that are more different than similar, or to stereotyping and all other forms of massification, it can go to extremes. I know I did (though never as far as solipsism or narcissism). Even if my politics were not extreme (at least not by pre-Obama standards), my individualism was. I realized how bad it had become when, at sixteen, I finished An American Tragedy and had thoroughly internalized the psyche of that great loner Clyde Griffiths: too far, too much, apart. It took a while, but central to my coming in (well, partially) from the outer orbits was Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, with our membership in the Body of Christ – not as particles but as separate, distinctive organs – and our Communion of Saints, along with the understanding that still we are separately saved: called by our very own names, watched as our very own bones knitted in our mother’s wombs. Just so could I now see individuality lending itself to communality. (Or, to paraphrase Lewis, instead of studying people I should get to know them.)

So into the bin with all your Rand – her Aristotle and philosophies of reason and theory of capitalism and . . .  All can be gotten more leanly, honestly, and usefully elsewhere – toss it all, except for Anthem. (Do not assume that what marks the whole of Rand applies to each of its parts!) Let that, or any version of it you choose, be the antidote to the toxic Fallacy of Composition, Rorty’s Us be damned.
 

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James Como is the author, most recently, of The Tongue is Also a Fire: essays on conversation, rhetoric and the transmission of culture . . . and on C. S. Lewis (New English Review Press, 2015).

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