One of the gems in The Ayn Rand Column is "The Only Path to Tomorrow," which appeared in the January 1944 issue of The Reader's Digest. I have an interest in Ayn Rand's early writings, partly because of the generosity she showed in giving credit to her own favorite writers and those who influenced her (consider her comments about Victor Hugo, Aristotle, the Founding Fathers, Dostoyevsky, von Mises), and partly because she came to prominence as a writer at about the same time as many of the lights of America's own "Old Right" began to fade (John T. Flynn, for example, and Garet Garrett and H.L. Mencken).
Anyway, a project of mine is re-reading a lot of Rand's work in its chronological order, so spending some time on "The Only Path to Tomorrow" is part of that, too. In conjunction with my audio cassettes of Basic Principles of Objectivism and a close re-reading of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (with some help from Gary Hull's excellent little booklet, A Study Guide to Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, I should have quite the nice little organized study of Objectivism laid out, using only materials I already own. (For the record, I'll also be using another booklet, A Study Guide to the Ethics of Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff and David Kelley, of historical only as it's out of print, and I intend to acquire the Understanding Objectivism lecture series as well. In the fullness of time...)
"The Only Path to Tomorrow" begins this way:
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
How true! Consider that for Ayn Rand, writing this as she did at the end of 1943, it was already clear that America's military enemy, the totalitarian Nazi Germany, would lose World War II: by then, it was only a matter of time (Fascist Italy had already surrendered). It was already clear, too -- to Ayn Rand if not to many of America's political and "moral" leaders -- that in our wartime ally, Soviet Russia, we already had another threat, indeed, mortal enemy. A threat which existed because of its totalitarianism.
Stripping away the concrete differences (such as who benefitted from specific policies in each totalitarian regime), it's also clear that the German and Russian states of the day were totalitarian in the same way and to the same degree. It's hard to split hairs, after all, over the meaning, interpretation, and implementation of "total." This supports Rand's use of the term "totalitarian philosophy" as opposed to "Nazi" or "Fascist" or "bushido" or even "Marxist-Leninist" philosophy, a use which I think is well-defended by her comments, later in the column, on individualism.
Such use also points the way, though, to today's struggles within the Republican Party (free markets and capitalism vs. capture by the Religious Right), the Democratic Party (individual liberties vs. doctrinaire Leftism), and, on a larger scale, to today's war between Islam and the West. It is with this last that we see the truth of Rand's comment that the best ally of totalitarianism is not "the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies." As evidence, consider anyone who brands Islam as a "religion of peace."
"Confusion of its enemies," indeed.
Rand then attacks the idea of using force to impose a condition of "the common good." In an economical number of paragraphs, she begins with "Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by 'altrusist' who justify themselves by -- the common good," and concludes with
We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that "the common good" is superior to individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees.
That last sentence, incidentally, should be a more well-known Rand quote than it is.
The column goes on to advocate limits on government and includes a beautifully succinct justification of the right to property:
The right of liberty means man's right to individual action, individual choice, individual initiative and individual property. Without the right to private property no independent action is possible.
Nicely put. In other words, property rights are human rights.
"The history of mankind," Rand continues, "is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective."
While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Ah, the climax of the piece, and one of her most famous one-liners as well. By this standard there never was any Nazi civilization, never was any Soviet civilization. I think most rational people will agree with me here. But I'll go beyond that: by the standard of "setting man free from men," there was never any "Christian" civilization, either, with the exception of the Renaissance (quite an exception, that) and there damn sure never was any sort of "Islamic" civilization. Never was, ain't none now, never will be.
The Only Path to Tomorrow. Great little piece.
Posted by Craig Ceely at August 3, 2005 11:05 PM