Arwulf Objects To The New (and Old) Objectivism

By Arwulf Arwulf

November, 1994. Large posters appear on the walls and kiosks of central campus: YOUR PROFESSORS' WAR AGAINST THE MIND: THE BLACK HOLE OF POST-MODERNISM AND MULTICULTURALISM. There is a free lecture being given by Dr. Gary Hull, philosophy teacher at Wittier College and Claremont Graduate School. He is also a graduate of the Ayn Rand Institute's Advanced Philosophy Seminars. The event is sponsored by the U-M Students of Objectivism. Arwulf cannot attend the lecture, being committed to a film screening across the hall. But he does manage to swipe some literature from the propaganda display. Later, upon glancing through the stuff, he becomes nervous and nauseated.

Most of the one-liner titles are axiomatic and blunt Example: HEALTH CARE IS NOT A RIGHT. Yes, very nice, thank you. What particularly grates upon the nerves is an article condensed onto one leaflet with the title: OBJECTIVISM vs. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS - THE CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS CONTROVERSY: WESTERN CIVILIZATION vs. PRIMITIVISM by Michael S. Berliner, Ph.D., Executive Director, the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Marina del Rey, California, U.S.A.

Ever since that night at the end of November, this one leaflet full of lies and arrogance has been nibbling at me, and it's been necessary for me to publish a response in order to eradicate the monster from my mind. Most bullshit doesn't linger like this. Must be the nature of the spew. Before I expose it, let's talk briefly about Ayn Rand.

Alissa Rosenbaum was what she was called initially. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905, she came from a well-to-do family which became less well-to-do when papa's business got nationalized under the new Bolshevik regime. Herein lies the root of much of her animosity towards any form of Socialism, and her lifelong obsession with capital gains.

At age 20 she headed for These United States, where she was to change her name and establish herself as a writer of Hollywood movie scripts (Red Pawn is one I am anxious to view) with a pronounced tendency to badmouth leftists in general and Democrats in particular. In later years she was to consider Lyndon Johnson a Socialist. Her bitterly anti-communist views carne in handy at hearings in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, where she personally assisted in the tarnishing of images pursuant to blacklisting.

Stefan Kanfer, in his "Journal of the Plague Years," a history of Hollywood Blacklisting during the '40s and '50s, refers to Rand's "homely philosophy of profit-as-revelation," and her "exquisite philosophy of greed ." He's not exaggerating. There is an acerbic egotism about her utterances, and an alarming view of capitalism as a religious experience.

Gore Vidal (among my heroes) wrote in 1961 : "This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self-interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the 'freedom is slavery' sort." Vidal, as usual, is accurate. Rand, we suspect, is bonkers.

I have managed to avoid this creature's written works, including the ubiquitous "Atlas Shrugged." For a moment I was tempted to pose as an American by basing my entire commentary upon hearsay, but decided that would be self-defeating. With instinctual revulsion brewing within me I examined the evidence left in her wake.

If Rand is remarkable for her sheer arrogance and frightful logic, those who are carrying on in her name are even more so. The first thing we notice about Dr. Berliner and his crowd is their bandying about of the term "politically correct." This is a label to be pasted squarely across the mouths of those with whom one disagrees. The inference is that the individual has devoted insufficient thought to the subject at hand and is following some preconceived party line conceming the issue in question.

Strangely enough, "PC" is something which right-wingers invariably accuse leftist intellectuals of resorting to, while nobody appears to be asking about the political correctness of the right. The most visceral example would be the issue of a woman having the right to choose what occurs within her own uterus. For many of these people, such a choice is politically incorrect. Legalization of marijuana is poiitically incorrect if you're a Republican. You really can't hang dogmatism solely upon the left. Dogma is a human trait and every sort of thinker suffers from it to some extent. Among the most afflicted are they who are so quick to whine about "PCers."

Here's a taste of Dr. Berliner's own brand of Randism: "Columbus.. .brought America to the attention of the civilized world.... The opening of America brought the ideas and achievements of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and the thousands of thinkers, writers and inventors who followed. What they replaced was a way of life dominated by fatalism, passivity, superstition and magic. Prior to 1492, what is now the United States was sparsely inhabited, unused and undeveloped . . .there was virtually no change, no growth for thousands of years. With rare exception, life was nasty, brutish and short... there were endless, bloody wars. Whatever the problems it brought, the vilified Western culture also brought enormous, undreamed-of benefits, without which most of today's Indians would be infinitely poorer or not even alive."

So deeply does this kind of talk sicken me that I am having trouble setting it down in transcript so that you may see what these people are about. I've got news for Dr. Berliner: Most Indians today are infinitely poor or not even alive. Not alive! I feel like getting a few Apaches together and paying this guy a visit, letting him tell it to them in person, the fucking bastard.

Berliner says that European culture is "the objectively superior culture," but what he isn't taking into account are the deeply rooted misconceptions inherent in Western thought, and the brutality which is our manifest heritage. He invokes Aristotle, with his famous penchant for counting everything out, but fails to mention Francis Bacon, who advocated the subjugation of Nature, saying that we should interrogate her and essentially torture her secrets from her. If this sounds like Inquisition talk, it is. Radical Feminist scholar Lindsay Forbes speaks of the Inquisition of the Land, a continuation of the Old World Inquisition perpetrated upon the people, and especially upon women. When I look at what's been done to this continent, the Inquisition of the Land seems a chillingly appropriate phrase.

Consider the forests of Old England, almost completely decimated so that the British Navy could rule the seas and set up those wonderful philanthropic colonies. This Western way of thinking is not something to be entirely unashamed about. As someone once said, growth for its own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Such a refusal to admit that we have inherited some terrible tendencies as regards the very earth we tread upon sterns from a patriarchal hierarchic system based upon oppression of women and uncompromising dominance over all cultures who are different from the "objectively superior" one. This unpleasantness can be traced all the way back to Zarathustra and the dualism of Goodness versus Badness. It's got little to do with actual reality.

From William Carlos Williams: "We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery." This from his 1925 masterpiece of historical reflection, "In the American Grain," wherein he ponders the peculiarities of the Pilgrim mindset, saying "it is still today the puritan who keeps his frightened grip upon the throat of the world lest it should prove him empty."

Berliner should not speak so disparagingly about magic. Thinker and writer Starhawk defines magic as "the art of changing consciousness at will." According to that definition, magic encompasses political action, which is aimed at changing consciousness and thereby causing change.

(SEE PAGE 21)

ARWULF

(FROM PAGE 10)

But I want to give the last word to multi-instrumentalist and composer Anthony Braxton, who in his "Tri-Axium Writings" states that "because of various historical factors, including slavery and the virtual annihilation of the Native American, America has developed a mainstream culture that is not only racist but also peculiarly hostile to altemative value systems.... Western science...considers the 'truth' of a phenomenom to be solely to do with how it works, not with its 'meta-reality implications.' The result is a scientific establishment that suffers from an inability to recognize the total context of actual life.... Science needs to reintegrate intuition and spiritual awareness into its functionalism because the fact is, dynamic functionalism without a spiritual basis means nothing. Contemporary technology without a feeling for humanity is not impressive.... Dynamic productivity while half the world is starving is not just.... What good is technical brilliance and political domination if there is no reason for living?"