the only haven you can trust

(Mirrored from facebook because I don’t trust those assholes)

When I was in high school, I thought I was a liberal.

My parents weren’t aggressively political; they didn’t like Reagan, but I never had a clear sense of why they didn’t like him, and I didn’t grow up indoctrinated to liberalism. I suspect it’s just part of being a teenager: I was spoonfed environmentalism by every possible source. If you watched anything on PBS during the 80s, you were almost certainly going to be told about the danger to the planet.

Teenagers are good at believing simplistic ideas very strongly. I thought Earth First was a great idea, because the simplified calculus of environmentalism said it was. If we’re all going to die unless we change our planet-raping ways, and changing our ways meant that a handful of people have to die or be injured or starve or whatever dire consequences seemed likely, society clearly had an obligation to sacrifice that smaller group. Simple, and thus perfect for a clever but naive teenager.

Environmentalism was really the only issue, as well. Every other key liberal issue was part of a large, undigested mass of belief that I never felt any urge to pick apart or analyze in any way. Racism and sexism were bad, and liberals agreed, so what more did I need to know?

In my senior year of high school, I was given a copy of The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I’ll assume that you know who that is, and what her beliefs encompassed. It struck me in a way that nothing I’d read before had done. It was a complete system of thought, self-contained and self-justifying, explaining what seemed to be deep contradictions in the bundle of liberalism I’d thought I believed.

It didn’t take me long to absorb it completely, this new way of thinking, this ‘Objectivism’. I’d become a sophisticated thinker, a real intellectual, someone who’d actually thought about all the issues on which he held beliefs. I’ll leave aside for now the odd coincidence that all my careful thinking had somehow led me to exactly the same conclusions Rand had reached. The important thing was that I had now made a conscious choice of ideology, and it felt good. It felt good to have strong opinions about every little issue that came along, to be able to debate any idea or proposition with a sense of authority. It’s how I imagine Christian literalists feel when they’re able to pull out chapter and verse citations.

Now I knew to reject all the assumptions of liberalism. Environmentalism was shallow and absurd; obviously, the government could never solve the problems of pollution and resource exhaustion. Only the marketplace could do so — and that assumed there was even a problem to begin with, which I had also learned to doubt openly. Racism was really a liberal problem; the proper way of thinking was colorblindness, and my belief that colorblindness was not only possible but necessary was part of the edifice of thought I was carefully constructing.

This was an extremely comfortable place to be. I was able to be smug and self-confident, agressive towards the unenlightened and part of an automatic and unexamined community. As a brand-new freshman in college, I was susceptible to feelings of loss, anonymity, confusion and abandonment: alone at last, in the big scary adult world. What Rand’s ideas gave me was the arrogant confidence that the adult world was full of halfwits and morons, people with bad ideas and evil people exploiting the stupid for their own ends.

The most seductive part of Objectivism is the way that it takes all the values you know somewhere deep in your filthy little altruistic soul are good and right, and assures you that they’re all ok, they’re natural, and they’re best served by Objectivism. In a properly Randian world, there would be no poor, there would be no pollution, there would be no racism or sexism, there would be no cruelty or oppression. All these things are completely solved by the magic of Objectivism. And it was magic, despite all its pretense of rationality, because it supposed things to be true that could not be tested or verified. Much like Marx’s claim that the workers’ state would ultimately wither away, the claims of Objectivism included a counterfactual premise: ‘In a properly rational world, …’

So I could be both certain of my greater benevolence and love for my fellow man, and also contemptuous of the weak-minded fools all around me. Never has there been a better fusion of the basic desires of the clever outcast teenager. I was a more moral person than those I despised, and my morality was in no way threatened by despising them.

It’s a particularly nasty trap for an atheist, because rejection of God so easily transitions into rejection of the spiritual, which then is a short hop to rejection of such airy-fairy abstractions as ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ and ‘happiness’ and ‘love’. It’s easy to replace all those with their sterile Objectivist counterparts, which share the same names but use convoluted logical paths to reach subtly but importantly different ends. By demonizing the impulse in humans to aid other humans regardless of any possible benefit to one’s self, Objectivism neatly embedded itself in rational atheism. God says, love thy neighbor. You know God is bullshit, so it’s easy to accept when Rand says loving thy neighbor is bullshit, too.

Getting older, and spending some time really profoundly poor, shook but did not topple the edifice of my beliefs. After all, believing the rich are morally superior to the poor when you, yourself are poor is a great prescription for self-flagellation, penance, and increased fervor.

Nevertheless, a commitment to careful thought and self-analysis was a guaranteed way to undermine any monolithic belief system. After a while — without realizing I had done so — I stopped re-reading Rand. When it occurred to me that I hadn’t read any of her books in a while, I’d assure myself that I’d internalized their message, and didn’t need to re-read to be sure in my convictions. And thus, over time, the steely certainty began to give way to a more reasonable, practical philosophy of libertarianism.

Libertarianism is, on the face of it, a great idea: everyone should just be left alone to do what they want, as long as what they’re doing doesn’t hurt anyone else. It fits nicely into some ideas to which I’d become quite attached (and still am): drugs should be legal, prostitution should be legal (but pimps should be put in jail with a vengeance), war is basically bad and the draft is about as evil as it’s possible to be, the death penalty is pretty awful, and all sexual identities are equally natural and acceptable.

This was fine, and made me feel a lot better about the way I’d actually been living my life — clearly not living up to some Objectivist ideal of perfection, but still pretty convinced that there was a kernel of truth in Rand’s thinking. There were some hidden assumptions I didn’t question, of course, as I’d already internalized them from reading Rand. Taxes are, for instance, theft. Most libertarians believe that, and Rand certainly did. ‘Social justice’ is an oxymoron; justice applies only to individuals. Lots of things like that, where difficult concepts were smuggled in under the larger banner of libertarianism.

(Oddly, Rand hated libertarianism; it reeked of compromise to her, and the idea that someone might compromise to actually accomplish any part of her agenda was anathema to her.)

Libertarianism was a reasonable place to be for a very long time. There are lots of perfectly sane, normal, healthy people on the internet who claim to be libertarians, and have the appropriate level of contempt for Beck-esque theocrats masquerading as libertarians. It’s much easier to find a supportive community when you’re a libertarian than when you’re a Randian hardliner. And finding a supportive community makes it easy to not question your core assumptions.

The journey away from libertarianism, for me, started with the 2008 election cycle. Obama, whatever his flaws as an actual elected official, gave one hell of an inspirational speech. It was easy to be caught up in the excitement of Obama’s candidacy. But more importantly, when I heard what the Republicans were saying, I found myself repelled. These troglodytes were supposed to be my political allies? I could smell the reek of theocracy on them, and I wanted nothing to do with it. So I voted Obama, and I came up with some justifications that let me believe I was still a libertarian.

Next, I discovered Tim Wise. If you haven’t watched his talks on white privilege, I strongly recommend them; Youtube can help you find them. Wise was a shocking eye-opener for me. I’d always felt pretty comfortable with my anti-racist beliefs. I knew, on a deep foundational level, that racism was unalloyed evil, and that every race was intellectually, physically and morally equal. And as far as I was concerned, that was that; problem solved. I couldn’t help it if the world didn’t work in a way that agreed with my personal beliefs, so it was easy to assume that I wasn’t part of the problem. Wise made it disturbingly clear that I was dead wrong — that, in fact, by not acknowledging the role of privilege in just about every part of my life, as a straight white male in America, I was part of the problem. I was a really large part of the problem, in some ways even more so than openly racist people.

This was all troubling, for me, because it suggested there was something deeply wrong with libertarianism, something philosophically suspect that was placing my stated beliefs in opposition to what I was coming to suspect was my actual conscience shouting something at me. I was uncomfortable around liberal ideas, because I had so thoroughly taught myself they were wrong; I was equally uncomfortable around libertarian ideas, because they seemed appallingly ignorant of the issues of privilege and theocracy.

The moment of clarity, though, came while watching Planet Earth, about a year ago. I was watching an episode in which a tribe of monkeys living on the edge of a cliff would work together to alert the whole tribe of approaching predators, so they could all flee to the safety of the cliffside. Suddenly, I remembered a central tenet of Objectivism, one that I’d carried with me and never questioned. ‘Reason is man’s only tool for survival.’ We each had to live and survive based on the contents of our own heads, based on our own intellects and our own rationality. Irrational behavior meant death for humans, in the same way that a cheetah dies if it cannot run fast.

And suddenly I knew where the error was, what the conflict was, and why I couldn’t resolve my conviction that libertarianism was right with my growing sense that libertarianism was broken.

Reason is not humanity’s only tool for survival. It isn’t even humanity’s most important tool for survival.

Humans are humanity’s most important tool for survival.

We are tribal, social monkeys. We survive only because we work together. We don’t hunt mammoths by being clever, we hunt them by coordinating with each other. We don’t build skyscrapers because we’re genius engineers and architects; we build them because we sit atop ten thousand years of accumulated knowledge, gathered painstakingly by a million ancestors, and transmitted to each of us by a community of caregivers, teachers, acquaintances, enemies, and rivals.

You are only reading this because someone who knew how to read thought it was important to teach you how to read.

Suddenly, I knew I was a liberal.

I’d come full circle, but where I’d arrived was a much more complex, nuanced, and thoughtful liberalism. It’s as different from the reflexive environmentalism of a cocky 14-year-old as Rand’s careful (though profoundly flawed) philosophy is from the incoherent rantings of the low-information theocratic Fox News mob.