Ayn Rand is widely hated. Indeed, if you made a list of thinkers that people “love to hate,” she’d be near the top of the list. Liberals hate her. Conservatives hate her. Socialists hate her. Indeed, plenty of libertarians hate her. It’s hardly surprising, then, that she has not been broadly influential. While she has millions of fans, they’re only a tiny share of any country’s population. Even when her fans gain positions of power, they’re hopelessly outnumbered by powerful people who disagree.
There is, however, one notable exception. One of Ayn Rand’s ideas has spread far and wide. Indeed, it pervades social media. The idea: The virtue of moral intolerance. Here’s how Rand explained it back in 1962:
One must never fail to pronounce a moral judgment.
Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.
It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage? (emphasis original)
In Randian jargon, we must never grant our intellectual enemies our “moral sanction.” Simply put, “[I]n no case and in no situation may one permit one’s own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent.” Building on this position, Rand’s inner circle ultimately denounced not only “sanctioning,” but “sanctioning the sanctioners.” Randian Peter Schwartz, who coined the latter phrase, elaborated:
The weapon necessary to defend against evil is justice: the unequivocal identification of the evil as evil. This means the refusal to grant it, by word or by deed, any moral respectability. It is by scrupulously withholding from the irrational even a crumb of a moral sanction — by rejecting any form of accommodation with the irrational — by forcing the irrational to stand naked and unaided — that one keeps evil impotent.
What does this mean in practice? Don’t talk to your intellectual enemies – and don’t talk to people who talk to your intellectual enemies. Because they’re your enemies too. Sure, you can denounce them; but you can’t have a civilized conversation. Indeed, engaging in such a conversation practically makes you as bad as they are.*
In my late teens, I knew many Randians who took the virtue of moral intolerance seriously. I partially bought into it myself; I was, after all, a teenage misanthrope. But the extreme forms always seemed crazy to me, and I gradually broadened my intellectual milieu. Once I was in my late-20s, I had so little contact with Randians that I gradually forgot about their self-conscious moral intolerance.
Over the last decade, however, the Randian virtue of moral intolerance has spread far and wide – especially on social media. All major political views now have outspoken exponents who self-consciously and self-righteously refuse to “sanction” unbelievers. Or “sanction those who sanction” them.
Is Rand really causally responsible for modernity’s moral intolerance? Probably not; the lines of intellectual communication don’t fit. Yet the fact remains: One of Rand’s most peculiar positions has spread like wildfire.
Is this really such bad news? Yes. I lived in a subculture that embraced Rand’s virtue of moral intolerance, and saw the devastation. Genuinely smart and nominally rational people were quick to take offense and afraid to ask questions. Indeed, many were so afraid to talk to the “wrong people” that they stayed in their Randian intellectual ghetto, parroting their guru and her appointed successors. Vocal free-thinkers were often purged. As a result, Randians were mired in error. When they were wrong (as they often were), they lacked the cognitive methods and social lifelines to stop being wrong.
The party line, of course, was that Randians had no need to root out error because they were so clearly and thoroughly right. Everyone outside of their ambit probably finds this megalomania comical, but the problem goes deeper than one Russian novelist’s eccentricities. Every group that deems itself clearly and thoroughly right is deeply wrong due to (a) their dogmatic methods and (b) the complexity of the world. Including yours. Including mine. Talking to people who agree with you while talking at people who disagree with you is a blueprint for building a Tower of Error.
Still, Randian moral intolerance did have one saving grace: It was a tiny subculture. Anyone who had enough could easily walk away. If the perceived virtue of moral intolerance continues to mainstream, where will curiosity find a new home?
This doesn’t mean we should listen respectfully to everyone. Personally, I draw the line at avowed Communists and Nazis. They really are unworthy of a response; therefore, I don’t respond to them. Nevertheless, we should still listen respectfully to a wide range of views. Perhaps your opponents are intellectually dishonest, but if you don’t listen respectfully, it’s very hard to tell. Indeed, even if you do listen respectfully, it’s hard to tell. I can’t read minds; can you? In any case, if you want to understand the world, you should focus on the truth of the message, not the morals of the messenger. Tolerantly engaging a wide range of viewpoints is a vital reality check. Ayn Rand badly needed this check. So do you.
* I’m well-aware that Rand enjoined her readers to judge others judiciously:
The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
But in practice, Rand almost never criticized anyone for indiscriminate condemnation – and her movement largely followed suit.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Nov 4 2018 at 2:57pm
Failing to denounce an evil idea or action is indeed usually a mistake. It is, however, also a mistake and a grave one, to denounce as themselves evil our fellow citizens who hold those evil opinions.
Philo
Nov 4 2018 at 4:52pm
“Personally, I draw the line at avowed Communists and Nazis. They really are unworthy of a response . . . .” Why just the members of these groups? Surely some others are “unworthy of a response.”
I think you should admit that the judgment whom to take seriously–with whom to value communication–is often quite delicate. One can reject obvious lunatics, idiots, and trolls, and (if feeling generous) one can simply inform the obviously ignorant, without taking their ignorant views seriously; but many such decisions will not be obvious.
Mark Cancellieri
Nov 4 2018 at 6:18pm
It’s usually not hard to tell at all. They typically have a blatant disregard for facts and/or rationalize like crazy, leading to a double standard.
For what it’s worth, Ayn Rand might have believed in moral intolerance, but she didn’t believe in coercion, which is true intolerance.
JdL
Nov 5 2018 at 11:35am
<i>”For what it’s worth, Ayn Rand might have believed in moral intolerance, but she didn’t believe in coercion, which is true intolerance.”</i>
Really? Did she favor an end to drug criminalization? And other consensual activities such as prostitution and gambling?
Ray
Nov 12 2018 at 12:11am
thays right. She did oppose coercion. She wanted to decriminalize drugs. She didn’t specifically address prostitution and gambling but made it absolutely clear that nothing should be illegal except force and fraud.
nobody.really
Nov 4 2018 at 7:42pm
Scott Alexander draws a useful distinction between regarding disagreements as errors vs. regarding disagreements as conflict.
The problem I see with Rand’s perspective is that it precludes the possibility of engaging people as if you share a common interests, and might simply disagree about strategies for achieving those interests. When I debate in public (for example, on this blog), I often try to begin with the perspective of pursuing a common objective. Even if I doubt the good faith of my interlocutor, I can’t make the same assumptions of those in the audience. And simply condemning my interlocutor will onto provoke defensiveness, shutting down any opening for critical reflection–not only on the part of my interlocutor, but on the part of any of the interlocutor’s sympathizers in the audience.
Admittedly, some people are attracted to dominance, and my style of debate may not appeal to those people. So I can’t entirely condemn people who treat disagreements as conflict and simply seek to dominate their interlocutors; different people play different roles in public discourse.
Terry Hulsey
Nov 5 2018 at 10:12am
Bryan,
It’s quite a stretch to attribute today’s intolerance to Rand’s moral hyper-alertness. If it were only true that all of today’s intolerant people had some acquaintance with Rand!
But – more in response to “I Was a Teenage Misanthrope” – it is true that many Randian neophytes fused the growing teenager’s maladaptive nexus onto the models of lonely heroic geniuses in her novels to create an intolerant shell around themselves.
I knew many such teenagers who in effect denied themselves their own youth – their one hour when to be green, open, optimistic, daft, in love, and often mistaken, was indulged by everyone with a smile. They gave all that away just to stand, no matter how mawkishly, for something greater than themselves.
RPLong
Nov 5 2018 at 12:07pm
Ayn Rand had such a lengthy track record of debating her opponents that it is hard for me to believe that you’ve described her views of moral intolerance accurately. I’ve read Rand’s works extensively, and the impression I always got was that one should never hesitate to articulate moral disagreement, and that we shouldn’t be wishy-washy about it. I never once got the impression that her advice was never to engage with them at all.
But, full disclosure, I have never been affiliated with anyone even remotely connected to her inner circle or to any card-carrying Objectivists, so to the extent that either of these social groups possessed a belief not expressly written in Rand’s works, I could be wrong.
IVV
Nov 5 2018 at 5:10pm
I just want to say “sanction” is one of my least-favorite words in the English language, because it equally means “approve” and “disapprove.”
robc
Nov 8 2018 at 9:00am
That is a common occurrence in the english language.
“Fast” is another obvious example.
And “literally” is almost there, despite everyone hating on literally meaning figuratively.
john hare
Nov 5 2018 at 5:10pm
Doesn’t much of this discussion boil down to the phrase “if you’re not with us, you”re against us”? Which in my experience makes the majority out to be enemies that you created.
Barkley Rosser
Nov 5 2018 at 8:16pm
This post, which I largely agree with brings out to me a subtle shift in meaning. Thus in fact “sanction” does properly mean to allow or approve of, but then we know that a disapproved of nation has sanctions imposed on it. Increasingly I have been seeing as happens that noun getting turned into a verb that has the same meaning. So now we “sanction Iran,” which does not mean approving of it or supporting it.
Peter
Nov 6 2018 at 8:25am
Claim: Rand was for the shuning of the vicious and this has become one of her influential positions.
Disclaimer: OK, it was not her that caused this popular position.
Disclaimer 2: OK, she also said one should do it rationally.
Kind of clickbait polemical.
I think there is some truth in terms of the factionalism, and I heard of these dogmatic Objectivist (copying lifestyle choices etc.), but I think ARI is now cooperating more with some libertarians and ‘intellectual dark web’ people. I really like the conservation (not debate) thingy, with people who are mostly decent and thoughtful, but there is certainly a strong truth in Rand’s notion of not showing the other cheek and taking a stand when necessary. Howard Roark is of course an artist, and there I think it comes more precise to stay true to a vision, whereas in engineering it is more about good practices, for instance.
Viking
Nov 6 2018 at 8:20pm
Sanctions can be a very good tool, if wielded by disciplined people.
My preferred sanctions would be: Any country that does not respect a set of basic human rights will get the complete Cuba treatment, and in line with the old Cuba rules (where any ship going there was excluded from US ports for 6 months), anybody trading with countries that do not respect human rights will be treated the same. The consequences would be anybody born in the sanctioned countries, including their leaders, will be unable to travel to the rest of the world, unable to bank in the rest of the world, and unable to trade with the rest of the world.
Does this suck? Yes. Is the current policy of wars, drone strikes, and supporting “moderate terrorists” better? Absolutely not.
If you are libertarian, and support the non aggression principle, ostracism and boycott is the only way to deal with societies that do not respect human rights, and don’t follow their own laws. Accepting refugees results in a contagion, that we incorporate the dysfunction into our own society. Current screening processes do not allow us to distinguish between victims and perpetrators of injustices.
This woulds divide the world into two blocks, those countries that respect human rights, and those that don’t. To escape isolation, a country would have to clean up its act. This would be painful, and in a sense a reenactment of the cold war and the iron curtain, but with nations like with individuals, change needs to come from within, not from outside influences.
Jon
Nov 7 2018 at 1:49am
A vigorous, civilized debate with ideological opponents, or even partial opponents, may be helpful to hone rhetoric and expose flaws. Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises always seemed to me to be very judgmental, unapproachable and dogmatic, while Milton Friedman’s willingness to engage and debate opponents in dialogue I would say has done more to broaden the appeal of liberty to the average person beyond the echo-chamber of discussion within the liberty movement.
Harry Binswanger
Nov 7 2018 at 2:23pm
Ayn Rand did not at all advocate not debating with opponents; she did not at all advocate walling oneself off from other ideas and movements. That has nothing to do with not sanctioning evil. What she opposed was communicating to the public that one approved of what one doesn’t, or that one considered something to be debatable that isn’t.
Two examples. The first is from Atlas:
The second is her refusal to have anything to do with William F. Buckley. The cause was the Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas that Buckley arranged for and published. That was one of history’s most vicious reviews. There was also the factor of Buckley’s main mission: to fuse religion into the Right.
As you can see, neither has anything to do with intellectual isolation.
Jeremy Kidder
Nov 9 2018 at 9:48am
1. Rand talked about seperating the good and bad within a morally mixed but not completely corrupt individual, and dealing or engaging with them to the extent they are good.
2. The Ayn Rand Institute and Objectivist intellectuals (not sure where you get the term “Randian”) such as Yaron Brook, Greg Salmieri, Onkar Ghate have sponsored talks with many intellectuals that have not been Objectivists including Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Douglas Murray, and others. This hardly fits your characterization of Objectivists.
3. Why do you draw a line at not talking with Nazis and Communists? What is your moral standard? Your feelings? or the fact that by engaging in a debate with them sanctions and legitimizes their views, as I think Rand would say.
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan
Nov 9 2018 at 5:46pm
The rub comes when you ask “What does this mean in practice?” and then, rather than quoting Rand or pointing to specific instances of her behavior and drawing a generalization from them, you declare a policy as if it necessarily follows.
Certainly some Randians followed and follow such policy; certainly others did and do not. As to Rand herself, she seems to have been constitutionally unable not to argue, and to have been frustrated that her opponents wouldn’t engage her more, which implies that she wanted to engage them more.
Benquo
Nov 20 2018 at 5:09pm
It’s important to distinguish “talk with people one disagrees with” from “sanction evil”. Often people have disagreements with me. It’s affirmatively good to talk it out with them if we can do so honestly.
On the other hand, the Cochrane Collaboration board seems to have been taken over by people who want to suppress criticism, and I can’t help but wonder whether, if the minority who didn’t want to suppress criticism had perhaps been a little less tolerant earlier on, the vote might have turned out the other way.
Rand of course wasn’t good at making this distinction, but we can and should do better – engage with people who are wrong, but resist the suppression of information and the temptation to accommodate oneself to it, and call out those who do otherwise, for their safety as well as your own.
Dave
Nov 26 2018 at 2:45pm
Rand’s approach makes implicit assumptions about the psychology of discussion and persuasion that often do not hold up. We can seek to disconnect our emotions and past history from our considerations of new ideas, but that doesn’t make it easy.
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