Tolstoy's Station

Although the pamphleteering Tolstoy did not consider it one of his more remarkable philosophical contentions, early on — viz. the underlying theme in War and Peace — he had decided that within the sweep of history prominent individuals count for nothing. If the Napoleon Bonaparte of War and Peace were never born, sociological forces of that time would have thrown up someone exactly like him. Though not entirely powerless, an individual, therefore, can only make the best of their God-given opportunities on a small, personalized scale. Tolstoy probably would have subscribed to the immortal words of Harry Callahan: "a good man always knows his limitations."

For Tolstoy's later gospel his implicit taxonomy of the individual is our key to understanding how, and why, we should narrow our horizons in the pursuit of divine salvation. Tolstoy thus marks one terminus of an extraordinary dichotomy. At the other end we find Friedrich Nietzsche, a political philosopher who extols the glory and the power of the individual to the exclusion of all else. Apparent opposites — Tolstoy, for example, considered eleemosynary activity the essence of life while for Nietzsche it was anathema [1] — in fact their affinities are more consequential. Neither Tolstoy nor Nietzsche understood that an individual has multiple sources of inspiration, that ideas and intentions flow from complex social inter-dependencies, and that, moreover, the ideal is not to be found in the preeminence of any one explanation, but through balance. Theirs is a spectrum of taxonomic failure. Atomized individuals, shorn of compassionate attachments, are of interest only for the purity and qualia of their will. Perhaps more to the point, Tolstoy and Nietzsche both sought the truth through the dark side, through Dionysian mysteries rather than Apollonian reason.

The spectrum, or syndrome, of taxonomic failure reverberates strongly throughout the history of ideas. Sorting out its real world effects, however, is a daunting and often confusing challenge. When we credit Tolstoy, for example — and credit him deservedly — for fathering good works, by offering up that credit we tend inadvertently to obscure or misdirect responsibility from the damage caused by a Nietzschean apotheosis of self. Taxonomic failure, one might say, breeds taxonomic failure...

Nowhere is such confusion more evident than in America, with the debased "philosophy" of Ayn Rand. In a recent, magnificent essay Mark Ames demonstrates persuasively that Ayn Rand was a textbook sociopath. Indeed, what else to call someone who built her career on crude, explicit exhortations to trample the weak, to curse the afflicted, and to cause injury for no other purpose than the exercise of power? Yet, astonishingly, Americans report in survey after survey that Rand's writings are among the most influential in their lives, running only narrowly behind the influence of the Bible. [2] What's gone wrong here?

The premises of American political life contain a number of unexamined assumptions of singular toxicity. In the first place, we were never meant to have a democracy: the very word "democracy" does not appear once in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights. Instead, what the founding fathers gave us was a blueprint for rule exclusively by establishment elites. The essence of that deal hasn't changed much in over two hundred years.

Furthermore, by grafting the institution of slavery into fundamental constitutional structures, e.g., the undemocratic Senate, the founders unintentionally ensured that even after the abolition of slavery the dominance over American politics by minority political power would survive unscathed. In short, the game is pretty well rigged.

No wonder, then, that at a popular level people think, "let the devil take the hindmost." Rand's pathological "philosophy" — in reality naught but a shadow of a shadow of Nietzsche's complete insanity — corresponds perfectly to the example set by American elites for the servile classes. Accepting Rand, people are simply giving voice to what they've been unconsciously trained to believe.

It's difficult to imagine how those beliefs can be corrected without also fixing the underlying problem.

[1] H. L. Mencken wrote that Nietzsche believed the sole effect of charity "is to maintain the useless at the expense of the strong." The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Luce & Co., 1905, pg. 108.

[2] See, for example, "Book Notes," Esther B. Fine, New York Times, Nov. 20, 1991; a Zogby poll from 2007; and "Is Rand Relevant?", Yaron Brook, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2009.