Rand having her concept of "man" and eating it too

[Roger Bissell]

Comments on Rand's "The Age of Envy"

in re the Frozen Abstraction fallacy

by Roger E. Bissell

1973

This 1971 essay by Rand is an elaboration upon her claim that the emotional atmosphere of today's culture is one of envy or, more precisely, "hatred of the good for being the good."

The experience of this emotion, Rand says, is possible only to a person who has sabotaged his/her cognitive development by avoiding mental effort and understanding. Such a person is instead pursuing whims and deception of others (thus freezing his/her mental functioning to the concrete level appropriate to childhood). Anyone who experiences this emotion as a characteristic response to the sight of his/her values, is referred to by Rand in bitterly caustic terms as a "hater," an "inhuman object," a "creature," "it," a "hating creature," an "envious hater," a "monster."

In other words, if one's basic, typical response to the sight of one's real values is hatred, one is not human, one is not a man. Yet, curiously enough, even though this assertion is stated or implied numerous times in Rand's essay, there are also certain passages in which she relents and temporarily admits these "haters" back to the human race:

"The hater of the good is the man who did not make this transition [from the perceptual level to the conceptual level]...[The hater has] as stagnant a mentality as a human being can sustain on the edge of the borderline separating passivity from psychosis...How does a human descend to such a state?"[emphasis added]

Similarly to her treatment of slave societies, Rand first relents long enough to condemn those human beings who are haters of the good. She then denies that they are human beings, but later lapses back into referring to them as human beings (or men), after seeming to have firmly ostracized them from the human race with such epithets as "creature," "monster," "inhuman object," and "it." (!)

As with her abstraction of 'society,'** Rand has frozen her abstraction of 'man' ('human being'). She excludes from it certain men whom she considers as possessing "a quality of abysmal evil." Then she fails to integrate her frozen abstraction consistently -- which would be impossible anyway, with her knowledge of man's nature -- instead allowing it to thaw out and expand again. (Coincidentally, this happens as her most intense expressions of moral wrath subside and scientific curiosity takes over.)

Unless we choose to indulge in psychologizing and to speculate as to Rand's possible motives, we are left with a sense of confusion and uncertainty. Why does she present such a grossly inconsistent discussion of the concepts of 'man' and 'society'? Surely it would not be out of place to suggest that there is some carelessness here -- a subconscious confusion of conceptualization with evaluation. It certainly appears that Rand has on occasion allowed her value-responses (i.e., her emotions) to control the way she sets up and uses her abstraction.

What, then, is the preferable policy? To conceive of and define 'man' as: the rational animal. This, of course, means not that man characteristically acts in accordance with reason, but that man has the volitional capacity to act rationally. Therefore, unless one contends that haters (and appeasers, who are even worse!) are metaphysically irredeemable, one must limit oneself to classifying them as (abysmally) evil men. Such a policy results in mental clarity, precision and objectivity -- with no compromise of one's moral principles.

** See "The Nature of Government" in The Virtue of Selfishness, where Rand writes, again inconsistently: "...these very benefits [knowledge and trade] indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment -- a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man's nature -- is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule." For a complete discussion of this issue, see my essay on the Fallacy of the Frozen Abstraction linked from this webpage: http://members.aol.com/REBissell/indexmm.html