47. My Path of Reason

47

TIBOR R. MACHAN

MY PATH OF REASON

FOR ME, BEING A LIBERTARIAN has a lot to do with being a philosopher.

It also “helps,” I guess, that I grew up under the post-war communist government of Hungary—and then under the stern totalitarian hand of my father, who reared me for several years after I escaped from Hungary at age 14. (I say “reared me” but what I mean is “ordered me around constantly, in the most disapproving and hostile manner.”)

So I am sensitive not only to the evils of totalitarianism but also to the signposts on the road that leads to it. I don’t believe my background pre-determined my viewpoint, and certainly I have met émigrés from communist states whom I feel are obtuse on political questions. I have also met many Americans just as passionate about liberty as I am but who have never had to suffer under totalitarian rule. But can I say that I would have gone on to write millions of words on the virtues of liberty had I lived my childhood in the Coney Island of the 1960s rather than the Budapest of the 1940s? I don’t know.

The question of how much one is the product of some concatenation of influences versus how much one is “self-made” has always been of interest to me. My weird childhood, with no steady guidance from without, encouraged me to make sense of things for myself. It is possible that much of what philosophy has to offer us is conducive to just this attitude, as distinct from what we glean from religion or mythology. Intellectually pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, with a little help from others party to the apparently endless conversation, seems to be just what philosophers of all stripes do—even those who deny the validity of the process.

When I was about nine or ten years old, I had, I believe, one of my first near-philosophical thoughts, something to do with cosmology. Lying on some patch of grass one clear night, I fixed my gaze on a star and thought, “If I were on that star, gazing in the same direction in which I am gazing now, I would see another star about as far as that one is from me now. But then if I were on that star, gazing again in the same direction, once again I would see a star about the same distance away. And so on. But that means the universe may be endless!” But I also thought, “Whatever the case, I am here on earth and will just need to make the best of it, whatever the size of the universe.” I suppose I was confused, but in a philosophical way. Another time, as I was sitting at a train station in Budapest, I mused about all the people milling about. “I wonder whether the fact that I am looking at and thinking about the people would have to be included in a very detailed biography about them.” Later I found this thought relevant to metaphysical and epistemological concerns, namely, the question whether reality is altered by one’s perception of that reality. I never thought it would have to be, at least not in most cases (and in some apparent counter-examples, it seems that perception does not “alter” reality directly but rather through some resultant action).

To the extent that I engaged in philosophical thinking as a child I found it exciting, but life proved to be a persistent distraction. So I did not really begin my philosophical education in earnest until my early 20s, when I had enough peace and quiet, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Air Force, to do so.

In 1960 I was in the United States Air Force, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. I had become interested in politics again after watching the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and I was further provoked by an article by William F. Buckley, Jr. in Esquire, “Why Don’t We Complain.” Buckley suggested that the reason violent protests occur in relatively free societies is that people suppress their dissatisfactions until they cannot be contained, then blow their cork. The notion that complaining is an honorable undertaking suited me. I wrote to Buckley about the article and he responded with a very friendly note. (Throughout the years I would remain on reasonably civil terms with Buckley, though very critical of his nasty treatment of Ayn Rand. In April 1982 I became one of the few libertarians he would invite on “Firing Line.” I interviewed Buckley for Reason magazine in 1982, right after my appearance on “Firing Line.”) After hearing from Buckley, I subscribed to his magazine, National Review. In it I saw an ad for Classic Books Club and signed up, acquiring fairly good editions and selections of works by Plato, Cicero, Aristotle, Montaigne, Locke, and others. All this mental ferment inspired me to pursue more ambitious educational goals than I had previously envisioned. (In 1976 I would finally publish an essay in his magazine, on the moral element in people’s support of government regulations!)

In the fall of 1960 the little Andrews theater group I had helped found put on The Night of January 16th, Ayn Rand’s popular play. I acted the part of a character who jumps up during the trial and confesses so as to save the accused heroine—if I recall correctly. Each night of the performance of the play we selected a group from the audience to be jurors. And then, after the verdict, we all went to a bar to debate what the verdict ought to have been. It was a fascinating exercise and I found the issues intriguing. We could never decide on the basis of the facts but had to reveal our sympathies for the moral traits of the characters.

I hadn’t by then become interested in Ayn Rand—didn’t even know she had written anything else. I was rather illiterate at the time, trying hard to get my High School Equivalency degree and prepare to go to night college. (I took a philosophy course from Peter Diamandopoulos, a wonderful Greek professor, later the disgraced president of Adelphi University.) Next summer, however, I read a review of Rand’s For the New Intellectual in Esquire, written by Gore Vidal, who panned the book for its avowed egoism and failure to champion Christian virtues. I was acquainted with two fellow airmen who had mentioned their enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s works. After I read the review, the first time I saw these two young men—Walter Allen and Howard Williams—I marched up to them and said, “Your hero was sure creamed by Gore Vidal.” I think it was Walter who looked at me quizzically and asked, “Have you read any Rand?” I said, “No.” “Well,” Walter replied, “don’t you think it would be best to read her before you decide that Vidal has the drop on her?” This, I recall, stopped me cold. It seemed to square with my sense of justice that if I make a claim about an author and think it to be worth parading before her admirers, I might as well know what I am talking about. So I borrowed The Fountainhead and read it.

I liked the book. In fact, it spoke to me profoundly. I had been struggling with my Roman Catholicism for some time by then, and the religion’s attitude toward sex angered me. I also knew a friend who was getting a divorce, a divorce that both he and his wife thought was justified. Yet I was supposed to oppose it even though I too thought it would be best for them to divorce. I had corresponded with a friend of mine, a priest named William Novicky, later a director of Catholic education in Cleveland. When I posed my dilemma to him about the married friends, he could give me only very bland answers—for example, I was informed that “God is putting you through some difficulties.” Well, of course, thanks for the news flash, “Father”; now how about a solution to them?

Now Howard Roark’s attitude toward religion—a self-confident dismissal of the very idea of God—was giving me pause. When his mentor, Henry Cameron, asks Roark why he decided to be an architect, Roark replies, “I didn’t know it then. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God.” In another place, Roark attempts to decline an assignment to build a temple because “I don’t believe in God.” Roark clearly is reverential and spiritual, but his reverence is for the world, not any heaven. I again consulted Father Novicky, who remained vague. I went to one of the abandoned runways of the base and walked all night long, pondering the issue of God’s existence. At one point I looked up, with my hands clasped as if in prayer, and said, “God forgive me but I cannot believe in you.” My thinking was that if God created me and gave me a mind with which to figure out the world and myself, and my mind gave me no cogent argument for His existence, then it would be an insult to God for me to believe that He existed. But no sooner had I this thought, I dropped the conditional nature of the argument and said, “My mind simply gives me no ground for believing in God. So I disbelieve in God. I am an atheist.” He didn’t bother to refute me, and no lightning smote me on the spot either.

Next came Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which I read in two days, without sleeping. I found it a good read and with great ideas, but it did take me only one encounter with John Galt—while Eddie was visiting with him below the Taggart Building—to realize that the anonymous track worker was Galt. The larger mystery of the book, that of the role of the human mind in the affairs of the world, did not unfold quite so easily for me. I skipped Galt’s speech at first but cut it out and made it into a little book that I could study later. Which I did.

In fact, a couple friends and I were soon staying up night after night examining Galt’s speech for logical flaws. We scrutinized the discussions of the purpose of morality, the contradiction of original sin, the nature of free will, the inescapability of the law of identity, and so forth. When finally we could not find anything drastically wrong—deploying our admittedly meager education—we started conjuring up suspicion of Rand’s motives for saying what she said. We hypothesized, for example, that perhaps she had been sent by the Soviet Union to discredit capitalism by associating it with atheism. None of this “psychologistic” line went anywhere, of course, and we were left with very powerful, persuasive ideas.

It turned out that NBI had some lecture series going in the Washington area and we went to some of them. I met Branden, who seemed terribly aloof and snide, though what he was saying made good enough sense. The only lecture series I attended all the way through was “Contemporary Theories of Neurosis,” which outlined competing schools of psychology. At a New York lecture I had the chance to ask Branden some questions, but these weren’t exactly welcomed, which puzzled me. After all, what especially appealed to me about Objectivism was the idea of an independent mind, the individual trying to answer questions or solve problems to his own rational satisfaction. But everyone has bad days, so I never made much of this behavior. I did find it peculiar how cliquish the people around the taped lectures seemed to be. But again, I chalked it up to the hazards of going against the grain; here was a group with very unusual views, so no wonder they were such a tense bunch. I disagree that there was ever a Rand cult as such—it was more of a Rand clique. A cult needs to be much bigger—like those that surrounding the Reverend Moon or the Merer Baba. It did disturb me that so few of the people at these functions seemed to laugh comfortably. Most of the laughs were snide and derisive. But I considered how strange this bunch must feel—just as I often did—to have embraced such wild ideas that fit nowhere on the standard ideological map.

In the fall of 1962 I left the Air Force and entered college. I had read about Claremont Men’s College in National Review—in a column by Russell Kirk—who talked about how wonderful and independent the place was. I flew there on an Air Force hop—that is, a free ride for service personnel—and contacted the admissions director, Emery Walker. I managed to gain admittance.

Before starting school I also managed to gain a meeting with Ayn Rand; I went to New York and met with her for about half an hour at her office. It was a wonderful experience. What would stick in my mind was how warm, calming, sensible and friendly Rand was. She showed none of the prickly traits I would hear about later. One thing I remember saying to her was that perhaps I liked her work because I, too, was a refugee from communism. She told me that she hoped this wasn’t the case, since her ideas were meant to have universal significance, not appeal only to those who shared her personal experiences. There was no badgering or finger-wagging. She was like a sensible aunt or grandmother. I promised to send her a letter I had written to my friend the priest, concerning the struggles I had been having with religion in relation to a friend’s divorce, and when I got back to Washington I sent it off to her.

Rand replied with a wonderful letter commenting on how my own exemplified her principle of the sanction of the victim—which it did. I had expressed dismay in my letter about a book the priest had given me, Thomas Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. The theme is that the human effort to know is an insult to God—a sign of pride and lack of proper humility. I told the priest how frustrated I was by this message. After all, my every effort was to know, to learn, to educate myself . . . yet this was to be spurned as sinful and a betrayal of the Most High? How could I accept this? Needless to say, my frocked friend had no cogent answer to these quandaries. But Rand stated that she was “deeply impressed with the letter you wrote to the priest. If The Fountainhead has helped you to find a way out of such a terrible and tragic conflict, I am very happy to know it.”

However, not long after this promising start, there was a silly tiff between Rand and me (mostly my own fault), and I was deemed persona non grata with Rand and her inner circle. I would one day be on friendly terms with Branden but only after his split with Rand in 1968 paved the way. In retrospect, I am glad that I was blackballed. I might have become as dependent as so many others did. And I am glad, also, that being cut off wasn’t so devastating a blow that I renounced the good ideas I found in Objectivism. In the years since, I have become one of the most prolific neo-Objectivist thinkers, probably giving more scholarly exposition to Rand’s ideas than anyone else (with the exception, perhaps, of Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl). Indeed, a book I wrote in 2003 for Ashgate in the UK is titled Objectivity, Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life.

It is too bad that the folks in the inner circle have not done better at promoting Objectivism themselves. When Peikoff finally came out with his long-awaited book, The Ominous Parallels—the joke was that just as parallel lines never meet, so this book would never get published—I wanted it reviewed in Reason. I no longer had much say in those matters, however, and could only get a very brief review scheduled. I asked several people with good qualifications to do the job but no one would take it on without planning to pan it. Finally I wrote the brief review myself, chiding Peikoff for missing an opportunity to produce a truly scholarly project that took alternative explanations, compared them with his own, and thus showed the superiority of his own thesis. I was disappointed—we had all hoped that this book would help to show the philosophical community that there is real substance to Objectivism. Rand’s essays, even her Objectivist Epistemology, had been too polemical to qualify as scholarship. Yet she herself kept urging all those who found her views sound to get out there and become the “new intellectuals.”

But there is no value to “new intellectuals” who cannot talk to the old intellectuals. And there surely are some who could have been reached, had the effort only been made. Instead, Peikoff and the rest of them—except for David Kelley, who in the end also got kicked out of the official movement—kept aping Rand’s style and thereby making short shrift of her substance.

I had a final word with Ayn Rand on July 4, 1976. I called her to express to her my thanks for being the most crucial contemporary thinker to stand behind and strengthen the meaning of the Bicentennial. Frank answered. I asked for Miss Rand and she came on the line. Here is our conversation verbatim, as best I can remember it:

“This is Ayn Rand. Who am I speaking to?”

“Miss Rand, I am a long-time admirer and wish to simply thank you on this day for what you have done to keep the idea of the American revolution alive.”

“Who is this?”

“My name is Tibor Machan.”

“Good bye.”

In my view there is nothing peculiar about Rand’s persona or impact, including some of their more negative aspects. Obviously, some of her prominent and not-so-prominent followers did forfeit their independence to a degree. But it should also be noted that a great many emerged easily enough from that dependency. I think that the emphasis on the cultism is little more than an ad hominem from people who really should not be tossing around labels in any case when it comes to the phenomenon of exaggerated personal and ideological loyalties. (It is often the most rabid factionalists who decry the rabid factionalism of others!) Almost all great intellects have generated the kind of social upheavals around them that Rand did. And most have been tempted to lord it over their students or disciples. There is nothing terribly surprising about this—given how large the egos are of such people, and how reasonable it is that they should fear being exploited.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy no one accuses of spawning a cult, once taught at Cambridge University. At the same time, it is reported, Frederick Waismann was also teaching a seminar in which Wittgenstein’s ideas were being discussed. Wittgenstein is said to have stormed into the administration offices, demanding that Waismann stop mentioning him, or else he would immediately leave Cambridge! That’s just one story—for more one might consult Paul Johnson’s The Intellectuals (a somewhat intemperate and over-generalizing book itself).

The internal convolutions in the philosophical movements spawned by brilliant people such as Marx, Mill, Freud, Wittgenstein, Popper, or Rand are partly a result of the fact that no one outside the immediate circle of followers cares all that much about the participants’ emotions and thoughts. Of course these figures have their idiosyncrasies—and they may be culpable for some of the ways their ideas are inappropriately appropriated. But this kind of problem, I think, is inessential. It is at any rate temporary. Sure, novel ideas and their creators are usually going to get embroiled in personal feuds, and these will reach a pitch that hardly matches the normal antagonisms of ordinary men and women. But only because many more people—namely, all those who are intensely hoping for personal enlightenment and the salvation that comes from knowing “the great one”—are privy to the intimate details. In the end, what counts most will still be who if anyone is right on the crucial questions that these innovators address. And little of the material that has emerged from discussing their triumphs and foibles instructs us about that.

Ayn Rand’s work has changed my life considerably. It helped me to see my life coherently and to identify its purpose. Especially given my awful childhood, which involved a great deal of belittlement and self-doubt, Rand’s affirmation of the value of one’s life and the virtue of living it by standards of one’s nature as a rational animal, have been very welcome to me. I doubt I could have lived as happily as I have, even with all the pitfalls, without Rand’s genius for me to draw on. I will always be grateful to her for what she has done to support the uniquely American political tradition, one that has helped me and others to stay free of tyranny. (My book, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite, tried to punctuate this point vis-à-vis the misguided environmentalist and animal rights movement.)

But having said all this, I do not believe that books make people—people make books, even in the sense that they make them something important to themselves. I was to discover this in a particularly wrenching way soon enough, while studying at Claremont College.

Claremont was just where I wanted to be. The intellectual hustle and bustle was exciting but also rather intimidating, since I lacked the sort of preparation for it that most of my classmates had. I was, after all, a high school flunk-out. But my motivation was greater than perhaps anyone else’s. I had been on my own for some five years. And I was eager to get in the swim with the American way of life, a sort of casual self-confidence exhibited in films by the likes of Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Gary Cooper. Americans didn’t fuss much. They did what needed to be done and went on to the next task, while also taking it easy and finding joy in life. Yet, I also saw that Americans didn’t have much of an explanation for why this mode of living was okay, even superior. So I not only tried to adopt the American style but also to learn why it was right. And why the opposite approach was wrong.

A tragedy taught me one lesson along these lines. One of my more intellectually vigorous classmates, David Chuchi, was experiencing serious despondency, supposedly in light of certain conclusions he had reached from his study of the skeptical reflections of René Descartes. At first he simply bemoaned the perplexities he found in the philosopher’s arguments against trusting our sense and judgments. But he then went on to lament the even more radical skepticism he found in the thinking of David Hume. And this wasn’t only something academic for him. Chuchi began to withdraw more and more, and even started missing meals. After a few weeks he could no longer be engaged in conversation about any of this. He would silently walk around and when we tried to inquire about his state of mind, he would not respond.

One Monday morning we heard that on the previous Saturday Chuchi had gone to a motel in Pomona, filled his room with gas, lit his lighter and blown himself up. He lived for a few days, conscious but near death, and could not survive his wounds. He apparently expressed regret for what he had done just before he died.

This event has never ceased to affect me. It taught me that philosophy can kill—and not just when imposed by force. I am convinced that Chuchi’s action was in part the result of his taking skepticism seriously. He was not a light-hearted person to begin with, and when he found something persuasive that seemed to reinforce his gloom, he did not let it go. Unlike David Hume, who claimed that he could leave his skeptical reflections behind when he left his study, Chuchi took the ideas home with him. I, too, have always found the philosophical ideas I was examining to be very practically significant, not a mere academic exercise. Fortunately I never saw much appeal in skepticism, either psychologically or philosophically. Quite the opposite. I know that human beings have the capacity to know the world. Of course, to actually learn about the world often requires enormous effort.

I never doubted that I, too, shared this capacity to know and had, indeed, a definite responsibility to figure things out as best as I could. This produced a certain confidence in me, as well as a sense of freedom to enjoy myself in life, despite the pretty awful things I experienced in childhood. We are all obliged to cope with various adversities. I think I did better than most, mainly by channeling whatever bad feelings I had into doing useful and creative things. While still in college I began to do some pretty intense writing to explore the ideas that I was making my own, and once I started I never slacked off. There would be many obstacles and many opportunities. But whatever came, I kept pushing ahead regardless.

I have no illusions about the impact of my work on the community of political philosophy and economy. Whatever its quality, the regard in which it is held is very mixed. And it is plain enough that my work isn’t coming out from Oxford or Harvard or Princeton University Press, nor am I asked to write for The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, or even The Public Interest. (I have, however, managed to squeeze into the pages of The American Scholar, Free Inquiry, National Review, The Humanist, Barron’s, Economic Affairs, and many good scholarly forums.)

The unevenness of my success is no doubt in part due to the often low regard in which the scholarly community holds libertarian and other ideas I am associated with. In part it may be due to the lack of upward mobility in academic circles. And in part to my admittedly sometimes hurried writing. Still, if I am to judge, the latter cannot be definitive; for many writers within the mainstream community manage to lope onto the front stage fairly easily, despite their occasional lapses. The bottom line, if there is one, has to do with what I champion in my works, which is the most radical idea in the history of politics: the individual is sovereign and not beholden to others in any enforceable way.

I have enjoyed the good fortune to be able to make the case for this idea on innumerable fronts, in innumerable regions of the globe, where I have encountered if not always the highest accolades, then at least a good deal of interest and respectful opposition. This response has made the journey very enjoyable, even apart from the very important fact that the causes I have championed are exceptionally worthy.

Tibor Machan holds the Freedom Communications Professorship of Free Enterprise and Business Ethics at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University.