The Anger of Compassion

William F. Buckley, Jr: Rest in Perdition

William F. Buckley, Jr. has now been dead a week. Encomia to him have been written by, of course, conservatives, not a few libertarians, many liberals and of course, members of the press. What is left, then, for an Objectivist to say?

Just this: ultimately, he'll be remembered for his shallowness and for his dishonesty, as well as for being a pretty poor judge of people. I offer in evidence these words of his, from his Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? his anthology of "American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century." Buckley is regaling his readers with the history of how he built the modern conservative coalition, along the way pitching Ayn Rand out of the movement on her ear:

Since this is an empirical probe, based on my own experience as editor of National Review, I shall speak about people and ideas with which National Review has had trouble making common cause. In 1957, Whittaker Chambers reviewed Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Miss Ayn Rand wherein she explicates the philosophy of "Objectivism," which is what she has chosen to call her creed. Man of the Right, or conservative, or whatever you wish to call him, Chambers did in fact read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement. He did so by pointing out that her philosophy is in fact another kind of materialism -- not the dialectical materialism of Marx, but the materialism of technocracy, of the relentless self-server who lives for himself and for absolutely no one else, whose concern for others is explainable merely as an intellectualized recognition of the relationship between helping others and helping oneself. Religion is the first enemy of the Objectivist and, after religion, the state -- respectively, "the mysticism of the mind" and "the mysticism of the muscle." "Randian Man," wrote Chambers, "like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world."

Her exclusion from the conservative community was, I am sure, in part the result of her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendance, intellectual and moral; but also there is the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, or Savonarola, or Ayn Rand. Chambers knew that specific ideologies come and go but that rhetorical totalism is always in the air, searching for the ideologue-on-the-make; and so he said things about Miss Rand's tone of voice which, I would hazard the guess, if they were true of anyone else's voice, would tend to make it eo ipso unacceptable for the conservative. "...The book's [Atlas Shrugged] dictatorial tone...," Chambers wrote,

is its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal...resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber -- go!"

Buckley ends his discussion of Rand thus: "What the experience proved, it seems to me, beyond the unacceptability of Miss Rand's ideas and rhetoric, is that no conservative cosmology whose every star and planet is given in a master book of coordinates is very likely to sweep American conservatives off their feet. They are enough conservative and anti-ideological to resist totally closed systems, those systems that do not provide for deep and continuing mysteries. They may be pro-ideology and ultraconservative enough to resist such asseverations as that conservatism is merely "an attitude of mind," as one contributor to this volume once upon a time asserted. But I predict, on the basis of a long association with American conservatives, that there isn't anybody around scribbling into his sacred book a series of all-fulfilling formulae which will serve the conservatives as an Apostles' Creed. Miss Rand tried it, and because she tried it, she compounded the failure of her ideas. She will have to go down as an Objectivist; my guess is she will go down as a novelist or, possibly, just plain go down, period."

Think about what Buckley is claiming here: Conservatism implies religion. Ayn Rand is an enemy of religion. So we're to believe that Ayn Rand, therefore, who didn't claim to be a conservative, tried to write an Apostles' Creed -- for conservatives? And Whittaker Chambers was therefore wise and noble to drum her out of the conservative movement? Who does Buckley think he is writing to, children? Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

And by all means, pay no attention to the conservative behind the curtain. What do we know about this Whittaker Chambers, a man revered by Buckley and by many other conservatives? We know that he was a liar by trade, a liar of long standing and apparently of some skill. He was a courier for the Soviet intelligence services operating in the United States before World War II, who left such service without revealing its existence to the FBI or to anyone else. When he did approach the FBI with his knowledge, he deliberately held some of his knowledge back. He didn't want to hurt his former friends, apparently. He held back in his testimony before Congress, more than once.

I like that line about "To a gas chamber -- go!" Whittaker Chambers either lied about having read Atlas Shrugged at all, or he lied about what he found in it -- or,perhaps he was simply the most incompetent book reviewer in the history of western civilization.

This is a noble man? And Buckley is a wise and sophisticated man? They belonged together, all right.

For make no mistake: William F. Buckley, Jr. was proud of his association and friendship with Whittaker Chambers, he is remembered for it to this day by the National Review crowd, and he will be remembered for it for years to come. The NR types remain proud of the Chambers hit piece on Rand, too, and it is still available online here. Judge it for yourself.

So it's now been a week and William F. Buckley, Jr -- like Francisco Franco -- is still dead. Soon, with any justice at all, he will be joined by another widely admired charming sophisticate, Fidel Castro.

Buckley once opined that Ayn Rand's novels were probably read for "the fornicating bits." Right: guess that's why they sell a few hundred thousand copies a year although free porn is easily available on the internet. Meanwhile, consider that Buckley treasured his friendship with scum like Whittaker Chambers, while eventually rejecting associations with John T. Flynn and Ayn Rand -- and, at least in the case with Ayn Rand, there was more than a shade of dishonesty involved. Whatever else is to be said about him, that must be said. This is, perhaps, all we need to know.

Posted by Craig Ceely at March 5, 2008 09:20 PM