The first essay included in The Return of the Primitive centers on the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" protests of the 1960s, and it also forces me to commit a typographical crime in the form of a double end-quote due to how I format my post titles. The reason for this is because Ayn Rand is the Sargon of Akkad of the 1970s. More on that later. The more specific reason for this is because Rand wants to make it clear that she doesn't consider these students to really be rebels, she considers them to be conformists who merely appropriate the image of rebellion for the sake of branding and to feel cool, and for the first couple paragraphs and the title of the essay she'll persist in putting scare-quotes around the words "rebel" and "rebellion" to drive this point home.
This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or inaccurate summaries of the more relevant facts of the situations, in an attempt to control the reader's developing narrative. For example:
Claiming that their rights had been violated, a small group of "rebels" rallied thousands of students of all political views, including many "conservatives," and assumed the title of the "Free Speech movement." The Movement staged "sit-in" protests in the administration building, and committed other acts of physical force, such as assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum.
Of note: Rand continues to put quotes around "rebels," implying a point that she'll make later, that they are in fact a conformist arm of the intellectual establishment, even in the same sentence in which she describes them as a "small group [who] rallied thousands of students," the implication being that some significant portion of those in attendance acted more as useful idiots than individuals engaging in legitimate political action, underscored by the inclusion of "conservatives," who of course could never have a genuine, principled reason for wishing to engage in free-speech demonstrations alongside radical leftists. She wants to have her cake and eat it too; the rebels are the establishment, we're the underdogs, but also they're really just a small minority group, their views aren't that common (because they're absurd, of course). And finally she summarizes the movement's numerous run-ins with public law enforcement as "assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum." Of course, the F.S.M. did famously utilize a police car as a platform from which Mario Savio addressed the crowd; what Rand fails to mention in this summary of the event (or indeed anywhere in the essay) is that the police car in question contained a student who the police were trying to arrest for the crime of setting up an unauthorized table to disseminate unauthorized political views and information. The car wasn't "seized" by a group of unprovoked students who simply wanted something to stand on and shout from, it was obstructed by protestors who were outraged at the sight of an American citizen being arrested for sitting outside a building in a public university and promoting his worldview. The car later being used as a rostrum was simply because it was in the center of the obstructing crowd and therefore a convenient place to stand and address them.
All this may seem pedantic, but it's an important distinction; Rand's framing presents the rioters as an unprovoked, violent force who simply took a police car because they wanted it. The reality of the situation is that the police were obstructed in an act of political violence. The same goes for the "assaults" on the police that Rand references; The F.S.M. was a big event and I have no doubt that at some point in it, there was at least one (and probably more than one) student who decided to attack a police officer unprovoked, but to present this as the framing of the entire situation is simply dishonest. The police acted as an insurgent force against largely non-violent protests, and were met with violent resistance. Are protestors not allowed to defend themselves from the violence of the system?
In fact, Rand continually engages in dishonest apologia for the establishment throughout this piece; not only does she ignore and erase the very real presence of police violence at the campus protests, she essentially whitewashes the university administration's role in all this through the use of lies of omission in her descriptions of their stances. For example, University President Clark Kerr's address to the students and faculty on December 7th is summarized thus:
Kerr attempted to end the rebellion by capitulating: he promised to grant most of the rebels' demands;
What specific demands did he promise to grant? How many, and which, did he not promise to grant? No further details are offered. Just "most of them."
Rand continues:
Whereupon, Mario Savio, the rebel leader, seized the microphone, in an attempt to take over the meeting, ignoring the rules and the fact that the meeting had been adjourned. When he was -- properly -- dragged off the platform, the leaders of the F.S.M. admitted, openly and jubilantly, that they had almost lost their battle, but had saved it by provoking the administration to an act of "violence" (thus admitting that the victory of their publicly proclaimed goals was not the goal of their battle).
There you have it. Kerr went up and promised to meet the demands of the protestors, and in response they attempted to seize the microphone, and later spoke of this capitulation as a danger to their cause. Clearly they never actually wanted their demands met.
Obviously I'm being facetious. Here's the information that Rand has kept from you in order to make her point: the only thing Kerr promised at that address was that F.S.M. protestors who had already been arrested and/or suspended would be granted amnesty for their "crimes" on campus. He maintains that the University will continue to punish students for advocating illegal off-campus political activity. (And, to be clear, "Illegal off-campus political activity" in the 1960s included things like sit-ins and public protests, particularly those supporting the civil rights movements. Remember, the establishment gets to decide what is or isn't legal, and in many cases they decide that whatever is done to change the establishment is illegal. Savio himself took part in the F.S.M. after discovering that advocating for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization that practiced nonviolent civil disobedience among other activity, was disallowed under the University's rules.) None of this is a capitulation to the "original goals" of the movement, it's simply an attempt to placate the protestors by dropping the existing charges against them, while reiterating that should they perform similar activities in the future, they will then be punished for doing so. What Kerr was proposing is that both sides simply forget the events of the past several months, and move forward with the existing status quo. Framing this as a "capitulation to the demands of the rebellion" is nonsensical; what was being proposed was a capitulation to the demands of the University administration in exchange for letting the protests which had already occurred slide.
The next major event in the F.S.M. timeline occurred the very next day, when the University's Academic Senate voted 824 to 115 endorsing the F.S.M.'s demand that the University only regulate the time and place of political activity, not the content of the speech or the political causes being advocated.
However, Rand chooses to dedicate the next portion of the essay to the various media responses to the event:
What followed was nationwide publicity, of a peculiar kind. It was a sudden and, seemingly, spontaneous out-pouring of articles, studies, surveys, revealing a strange unanimity of approach in several basic aspects: in ascribing to the F.S.M. the importance of a national movement, unwarranted by the facts -- in blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities -- in granting to the rebels the status of spokesmen for American youth, acclaiming their "idealism" and "commitment" to political action, hailing them as a symptom of the "awakening" of college students from "political apathy." If ever a "puff-job" was done by a major part of the press, this was it.
(Do you see what I mean about Rand being the Sargon of Akkad of the 70s? She's got a similar method of presentation, with overly verbose, meandering prose followed by a short, snippy, dismissive conclusion, to give the impression of intelligence and sophistication, but also directness and spontaneity. Imagine that paragraph being read by Carl Benjamin's pompous British voice, and replace the F.S.M. with some feminist movement or other.)
This digression into the media's "blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities" is rich given what we've already seen of Rand's writing on the subject, and indeed she continues to do exactly as she accuses journalists of in the coming paragraphs, when she describes the continued advocacy by some of the proponents of the F.S.M.
Specifically, Rand brings up the post-F.S.M. "Filthy Language Movement," wherein a number of students displayed signs emblazoned with obscenities and in some cases broadcast them over the University PA system, and there are two major issues with how she frames this. Firstly, she presents it as though it's a continuation of the F.S.M., which isn't true, only a small number of F.S.M. participants took part in the Filthy Language Movement and a number of people involved weren't even University students; secondly, she acts as though the fact that these people were publicly saying obscenities is in itself a condemnation.
From here Rand includes several excerpts of editorials and letters to the editor regarding the F.S.M., starting with one sent to The New York Times by a biophysicist working at the University of California; I won't include the entirety of this letter here as it's not particularly relevant, but certain parts of it are simply too amusing not to take this opportunity to look back on 50 years later:
Kerr agreed the university would not control "advocacy of illegal acts," an abstraction until illustrated by examples: In a university lecture hall, a self-proclaimed anarchist advises students how to cheat to escape military service; a nationally known Communist uses the university facilities to condemn our Government in vicious terms for its action in Vietnam, while funds to support the Vietcong are illegally solicited; propaganda for the use of marijuana, with instructions where to buy it, is openly distributed on campus.
Draft dodging?! Defection from imperial American interests?!! Marijuana?!!! Egad! The horror!
Even the abstraction "obscenity" is better understood when one hears a speaker, using the university's amplifying equipment, describe in vulgar words his experiences in group sexual inter course and homosexuality and recommend these practices, while another suggests students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as dogs...
I could not possibly clutch my pearls any harder! Homosexuality? Vulgar words? Sexual freedom? Truly this is the end of civilization as we know it!
Moving on to more relevant pastures, Rand reprints an excerpt from the Columbia University Forum's article, "What's Left at Berkeley," by William Petersen, professor of sociology at Berkeley:
The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech.... If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power.... [ellipses transcribed as they appear in Rand's printing.]
This is the first paragraph of an excerpt Rand describes as the "clearest account and most perceptive evaluation" of the events at Berkeley, and it borders on a non-sequitur. If one is being suppressed by an established authority who wields social, legal, and economic power over one's self, how is one to go about securing one's freedom without increasing one's power along one or more of these axes? Power is a prerequisite of freedom, and freedom is a form of power. The idea that somewhere there is some sort of "pure" free speech movement which doesn't concern itself with the acquisition of power is absurd, such a movement would get nothing done.
That a tiny number, a few hundred out of a student body of more than 27,000, was able to disrupt the campus is the consequence of more than vigor and skill in agitation. This miniscule group could not have succeeded in getting so many students into motion without three other, at times unwitting, sources of support: off-campus assistance of various kinds, the University administration and the faculty.
Everyone who has seen the efficient, almost military organization of the agitators' program has a reasonable basis for believing that skilled personnel and money are being dispatched into the Berkeley battle.... Around the Berkeley community a dozen "ad hoc committees to support" this or that element of the student revolt sprang up spontaneously, as though out of nowhere.
Petersen's take doesn't become anymore sensible as it continues; he goes on to assume that the F.S.M. must have received outside monetary and organizational support from some presumably wealthy influencer, based solely on the fact that the movement was successful in achieving its goals. This is quite a stretch on its own, but beyond that, isn't it also strange to claim that the movement exists primarily as a power grab, while also suggesting that it was supported and directed by people who already hold societal power? (That's without getting into the fact that, historically speaking, when people start making vague accusations of leftist movements being on the payroll of some indefinite benefactor, they're usually talking about a particular demographic, one that rhymes with "Pews." I'm not necessarily saying that's what Petersen meant, but I am saying that the rhetoric used resembles that enough to make me uncomfortable.)
But the most important reason that the extremists won so many supporters among the students was the attitude of the faculty. Perhaps their most notorious capitulation to the F.S.M. was a resolution passed by the Academic Senate on December 8, by which the faculty notified the campus not only that they supported all of the radicals' demands but also that, in effect, they were willing to fight for them against the Board of Regents, should that become necessary. When that resolution passed by an overwhelming majority -- 824 to 115 votes -- it effectively silenced the anti-F.S.M. student organizations....
And finally, the excerpt reaches its reactionary crescendo. When the school board was actively legislating what political speech is and is not acceptable on campus, there was no free speech concern present there, but when the Academic Senate voted to stop doing that, it amounted to the silencing of those student organizations that disagreed with this decision! This sort of rhetoric is so brazenly self-serving that it hardly even bears discussion. It's incredibly obvious that what Petersen considers to be a concern is built not on a foundation of well-examined principles, but merely in a desire to uphold the status quo. Authoritarian suppression is fine when it supports the status quo, mass civil disobedience is an infringement on others' freedom when it seeks to change the status quo, and the fact that Rand points to this as the definitive media examination of the events at Berkeley underscores the absurd contortions of her position.
Rand then spends some time firing off scattershot comments on various bits and bobs of media coverage and short quotes from F.S.M. participants. It's not really worth going over in any significant detail; Rand reprints a selection of quotes from F.S.M. participants espousing their support for various leftist movements of the time, some praising the Soviet Union and similar establishments, others expressing doubt of any form of statist control, communist or otherwise, after which Rand declares that the activists are militantly anti-ideology, that they refuse any and all labels and conceptualization, choosing instead to focus on the subjectivity of the current moment to the exclusion of all else. Rand is going to say this about people she doesn't like in almost every essay included in this book, and I'm not going to bother to point it out every time because repetition in political writing is incredibly boring, something Rand could've stood to learn. In this particular moment I'd simply point out that several of the students Rand herself quoted described themselves as having a steadfast idea of what they think the world should be, and described socialist countries as being closer to it than capitalist ones, and even the ones that only made oppositional statements were speaking of skepticism of specific ideologies, not of a rejection of the very concept of having a conceptual framework through which to organize one's worldview. Whether you agree with the ideals espoused by these students or not, it's simply dishonest to pretend that they don't have any. You'll just have to take my word that most of the many, many other times Rand lobs this exact accusation at some group she dislikes it's supported in equally flimsy ways.
After quoting several students who espouse some fairly definite ideological grounding for their action, Rand then begins quoting various mainstream media commentators, who all insist that the activists don't have any definite ideological grounding for their action. It seems fairly obvious that the 60s political establishment was simply unequipped to deal with a heterogenous political movement rich with anarchist strains, as they were unable to effectively commentate on the movement without the ability to neatly slot it into an ideological box. Which shouldn't be surprising, since even in this postmodern age of internet politics and disorganized hashtag movements, mainstream media still can't effectively commentate on any movement without the ability to neatly slot it into an ideological box.
With several pages of piecemeal media quotes and spontaneous snipes of commentary in place, Rand rediscovers the point of this exercise, and begins lambasting the media for their failure to unilaterally denounce the F.S.M. without qualification, including one hilarious moment when she emphasizes California Governor Brown's usage of the phrase "idealistic hypocrisy," accusing him of using "idealistic" as a softening qualifier to his accusation of hypocrisy. It's possible that Rand genuinely misunderstood this, English isn't her first language, after all, but given the level of grammatical mastery generally on display in her writing, I think it's far more likely that her incessant need to paint herself as a principled, heroic underdog against an evil and diseased world that systematically favors her ideological enemies led her to intentionally misinterpret what was clearly intended to mean "hypocrisy in one's ideology," not "hypocrisy which is idealistic, that is to say, hopeful." Nevermind the fact that what's being called "hypocrisy" here is the students' decision to pursue action outside the system, from a movement with clear anarchist underpinnings. Calling such a thing hypocritical is an absurd method of criticizing the F.S.M. by someone who clearly feels a need to denounce them but can't find a good reason to do so, even if Rand was right about "idealistic" being used to soften the blow (which I don't think she was).
All that finished, Rand decides to finally stop quoting lines from various articles on the subject and write something herself again;
Now observe that in all that mass of comments, appraisals and interpretations (including the ponderous survey in Newsweek which offered statistics on every imaginable aspect of college life) not one word was said about the content of modern education, about the nature of the ideas that are being inculcated by today's universities. Every possible question was raised and considered, except: What are the students taught to think? This, apparently, was what no one dared to discuss.
This is what we shall now proceed to discuss. [Emphasis Rand's]
Already Rand's analysis has hit a snag; clearly, judging by context, the specific college courses she intends to discuss are philosophy courses, (one assumes that the engineering curriculum is unlikely to have much bearing on a political movement, after all,) yet the way she frames this is by asking what "content" is being put into students' heads, what "ideas are they taught to think"? This, of course, is not the purpose of a philosophy course, it's not how that works. Philosophy education serves 2 primary purposes: To expose students to a wide history of philosophical ideas, both sound and unsound, in order to give them proper context both for modern philosophy and for their own future endeavors in the field (this is why philosophy courses still teach Plato's allegory of the cave and his theory of the World of Forms, despite the former having little direct utility save as a convenient metaphor for explaining a number of philosophical ideas to laymen, and the latter being an unsubstantiated metaphysical hypothesis which nobody really puts stock in these days) and to acquaint students with the sorts of epistemological techniques that are useful in philosophizing. The courses don't teach students what to think, they provide them with a number of worldviews and teach them how to appraise them and develop their own.
Before getting into the meat of her philosophical criticism, Rand makes a short digression to channel Carl Benjamin again:
These "activists" are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: "Brothers, you asked for it!"
She then spends a few paragraphs using viscerally emotive language to describe her ideological opponents as toxic and cancerous, which I'll do you a favor and skip.
With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical "mainstream" that seeps into every classroom, subject and brain in today's universities, is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it further and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-episotemology of shyster lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system -- by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true -- in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than-air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man's existence.
There's a lot to unpack here. First, the idea that Kant "divorced reason from reality" is at best a grave oversimplification of Kant's work. It might be more accurate to say that he divorced perception from reality, by pointing out that human beings don't directly experience "things in themselves" as they exist, but rather experience a composite representation of the world around them built by their mind. Which is difficult to argue with; in a world where perception varies heavily from person to person, where the blind and the deaf exist, where any number of substances or mental illnesses or even just being asleep could cause a person to hallucinate, literally experiencing a different world than what everybody around them is experiencing, how can anyone claim to be directly experiencing the one, true, objective reality? To do so would be an act of absurd egotism.
But this characterization of Kant is easily forgivable in light of the wholesale misrepresentation of pragmatism; It's true that the pragmatist definition of truth doesn't conform to the hard and fast "objective perception of reality with my eyes (specifically mine, not yours)" viewpoint espoused by Rand, but it's far from the ephemeral, self-congratulatory exercise she makes it out to be. One of the prerequisites for an idea to be "true" according to William James is that it be verifiable, that is to say, it needs to be something that can be checked against one's own past perceptions and the present perceptions of one's peers, and shown to be in keeping with the established pattern, and pragmatism's more general idea of truth can be (over)simplified as that which aids in one's continual attempts to manipulate the world around you through pattern recognition and prediction. In fact this view is remarkably similar to a lot of Rand's own ideology; the difference merely lies in the pragmatists' acknowledgement that this can create some strange results in places and that there's room for significant doubt as to the objectivity of any "truth" reached in this way, whereas Rand steadfastly insists that that which she perceives and which aids her in making predictions and manipulating her environment is universally and objectively correct. She lambasts other philosophers for simply acknowledging the limitations of their own human perception, even when the practical results of their ideas are nearly identical to her own.
She then goes on to describe her perception of Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, but since she describes both as extensions of pragmatism and she clearly either doesn't understand pragmatism or is lying about it, is it really necessary to go into the further flawed conclusions she extrapolated from this flawed premise?
No matter how cautiously the proponents of such theories skirted any reference to the relationship between theory and practice, no matter how coyly they struggled to treat philosophy as a parlor or classroom game -- the fact remained that young people went to college for the purpose of acquiring theoretical knowledge to guide them in practical action. Philosophy teachers evaded questions about the application of their ideas to reality, by such means as declaring that "reality is a meaningless term," or by asserting that philosophy has no purpose other than the amusement of manufacturing arbitrary "constructs," or by urging students to temper every theory with "common sense" -- the common sense they had spent countless hours trying invalidate.
As a result, a student came out of a modern university with the following sediment left in his brain by his four to eight years of study: existence is an uncharted, unknowable jungle, fear and uncertainty are man's permanent state, skepticism is the mark of maturity, cynicism is the mark of realism and, above all, the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.
Again, this is a gross oversimplification of the philosophy of the time, being presented as an objective, factual account of it; when the early 20th-century philosophical movements which laid the groundwork for what would become known as postmodernism suggest that intellectualism is not in itself any proof of the validity of one's views, and point out that opposing viewpoints with equal amounts of veracity in evidence can be found outside of intellectual circles, Rand caricatures this as "the denial of intellect." When these movements suggest that one has no ironclad evidence that one is truly perceiving the world as it is, Rand interprets this as "fear and uncertainty" being "man's permanent state." All Rand is doing when she philosophizes is rationalizing her own limited perspective in a desperate attempt to stave off ego death; Her philosophical contemporaries, in pointing out that nobody's perspective is universal, threatened her self-image as an objective, rational actor, and so she interprets their claims as attacks on the very idea of intellect, which she conflates with herself, and this "attack" scares her, so she comes to understand them as a philosophy of fear.
Now that she's thoroughly misrepresented the state of mid-20th century philosophy, Rand sets about explaining how the F.S.M. is in fact an extension of that philosophy, and therefore isn't really a rebellion because it adheres to what is commonly accepted in a particular, limited area of society (remember, that's the thesis in the title):
If these activists choose the policy of "doing and then reflecting on your doing" -- hasn't Pragmatism taught them that truth is to be judged by consequences? If they "seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society," yet shriek with moral righteousness that they propose to achieve their social goals by physical force -- hasn't Logical Postivism taught them that ethical propositions have no cognitive meaning and are merely a report on one's feelings or the equivalent of emotional ejaculations? If they are savagely blind to everything but the immediate moment -- hasn't Logical Postivism taught them that nothing else can be claimed with certainty to exist? And while the Linguistic Analysts are busy demonstrating that "The cat is on the mate" does not mean that "the mat" is an attribute of "the cat," nor that "on-the-mat" is the genus to which "the cat" belongs, nor yet that "the-cat" equals "on-the-mat" -- is it any wonder that students storm the Berkeley campus with placards inscribed "Strike now, analyze later"? (This slogan is quoted by Professor Petersen in the Columbia University Forum.)
Rand is yet again grossly oversimplifying and exaggerating the views of her ideological opponents; The phrase "Strike now, analyze later" is not a rejection of analysis, or a claim that there is no truth to know which could possibly inform actions, it's saying that the current situation is so odious that taking action to change it takes precedence over theoretically analyzing it. What these students are saying isn't that philosophy is worthless, but that there should be priorities, and changing the current, broken system is a higher priority than having conversations about the meaning of life. None of the rest of this paragraph really bears response, because "Strike now, analyze later" is the only quote from the F.S.M. included in it. The rest are quotes from various mainstream media outlets, describing their perception of the F.S.M. We're multiple layers removed from the actual views of the F.S.M. here, where Rand is criticizing her extrapolation of a mainstream pundit's misinterpretation of the F.S.M.'s ideals.
In the next paragraph she takes a sharp turn into discussing CBS's documentary, The Berkeley story, and for a refreshing change of pace she decides to respond to quotes from participants interviewed instead of simply taking journalists' analyses at face value.
"Our generation has no ideology," declared the first boy interviewed, in the tone of defiance and hatred once reserved for saying: "Down with Wall Street!" -- clearly projecting that the enemy now is not the "Robber Barons," but the mind. The older generation, he exlpained scornfully, had "a neat little pill" to solve everything, but the pill didn't work and they merely "got their hearts busted." "We don't believe in pills," he said.
Did you catch the sleight of hand there? Rand sneakily takes it as read that a repudiation of formal ideology is an attack on the mind itself, which is of course absurd. The person being quoted even clarified that what he was referring to with the phrase "ideology" is the idea that one can have a clean, pre-packaged worldview that will serve them in all cases and never require updating, a "neat little pill."
An intense young girl who talked volubly, never quite finishing a sentence nor making a point, was denouncing society in general, trying to say that since people are social products, society has done a bad job. In the middle of a sentence, she stopped and threw in, as a casual aside: "Whatever way I turn out, I still am a product," then went on. She said it with the simple earnestness of a conscientious child acknowledging a self-evident fact of nature. It was not an act: the poor little creature meant it.
Does this really bear analysis? Do I really need to explain why Rand being dismissive of the idea that the society one grows up in is a significant determinant in what kind of person they end up being is a ridiculous thing to do? Is any reasonable person going to fight my assertion that this is absurd? In fact, it's also directly contradictory to the core point of a later essay in this book, which I will not be covering because it's absurdly long and would require a lot of research into accepted preschool practices in the 1960s, "The Comprachicos," wherein she claims that progressive day cares and preschools of the time (and higher education too) are designed to mentally and emotionally cripple their wards, and that the damage done is often irreversible. What is this if not a claim that an individual's personality is often subject to the environment in which they live?
Such are the products of modern philosophy. They are the type of students who are too intelligent not to see the logical consequences of the theories they have been taught -- but not intelligent nor independent enough to see through the theories and reject them.
So they scream their defiance against "The System," not realizing that they are its most consistently docile pupils, that theirs is a rebellion against the status quo by its archetypes, against the intellectual "Establishment" by its robots who have swallowed every shopworn premise of the "liberals" of the 1930s, including the catchphrases of altruism, the dedication to "deprived people," to such a safely conventional cause as "the war on poverty." A rebellion that brandishes banners inscribed with bromides is not a very convincing nor very inspiring sight.
And finally, we hit the thesis alluded to in the title, that the "rebels" are in fact merely conforming to the existing status quo. This claim is made by simply conflating a number of establishments into a single entity; the intellectual establishment as represented by philosophy professors, the administrative establishment as represent by government and the college administration, and the social establishment as represented by the general cultural zeitgeist. The problem is that none of these are the same as each other. It's true that the intelligentsia of the time was broadly sympathetic to the F.S.M., and the F.S.M. never claimed to be rebelling against their philosophy professors. They were rebelling against the government, the college administration, and the goddamn police that were arresting them for handing out pamphlets and criticizing the US government, and more broadly they were rebelling against the cultural zeitgeist that viewed this as "acceptable" simply because it was "normal." Simply pointing out that the "so-called "rebels" at Berkeley" do in fact think things and agree with some of their teachers is not a meaningful criticism of the movement, nor does it significantly contradict the general perception of the movement as countercultural.
Rand then spends several pages reiterating that it's really the fault of the intellectual elites that all these horrible protests against reactionary and imperialist ideals are going on, which I'll skip for the sake of cutting down the already absurd amount of time this post is taking to write, and move on to what Rand regards as the "true goals" of the unnamed, vaguely defined "outside forces" who are definitely not cultural marxists, which is definitely not a euphemism for "jews";
The main issue was the attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool of political action. This attempt has been made repeatedly in connection with the civil rights movement. But there the issue was confused by the fact that the Negroes were the victims of legalized injustice and, therefore, the matter of breaching legality did not become unequivocally clear. The country took it as a fight for justice, not as an assault on the law.
Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual sees an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.
But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others -- regardless of whether the demonstrators' goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob's defiance of legality as such.
The forcible occupation of another man's property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a "sit-in" in the home or office of a person he disagrees with -- and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers -- and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength -- i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes -- the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others -- loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.
There are a couple issues here, not least of which being Rand's demand for "respect for legality," which aside from being lame as fuck is also at odds with most of her egoist philosophy; legality as a concept is the right of the sovereign to dictate what actions are and are not allowed in society, and in practice is the primary means through which political violence is exercised, justified, and normalized. Rand desperately wants to cast a student sitting at a table handing out pamphlets when they were told not to as some heinous abuse of physical force against surrounding society, a morally bankrupt exercise in intimidation, but the system which maintains societal order does so exclusively through intimidation.
What Rand (and, to be fair, a lot of other pundits) are either unaware of or willfully ignoring is that politics itself is, among other things, the process of determining when and how violence is to be utilized. The fact that the violence perpetrated on dissenters by the police is broadly accepted as "normal" doesn't make it not violent, nor does it make it acceptable. The idea that whether the use of violent coercion is moral or not is determined by whether it adheres to existing cultural norms is repugnant, as is any other standard which accepts or rejects violence on any terms other than whether it serves to support or suppress future violence.
And once you've addressed the fact that governing bodies are indeed inherently violent entities, there comes a need to examine the scale, degree, and type of violence being perpetrated by each party, in addition to the motives, and once one does it becomes clear that to even compare the two is almost comical; The establishment perpetrates an intensive degree of direct, physical, often lethal violence on a nationwide scale in the interest of maintaining itself, which is to say preserving its ability to continue to perpetrate the same degree of direct, physical, often lethal violence on the same scale or an even larger one. The actions of the F.S.M. I'm hesitant to even call violent as I would argue it somewhat degrades the term.
Rand disagrees, arguing that it represents an infringement on inalienable property rights through the use of physical force and is therefore an act of violence. There's a pretty obvious problem here in that, assuming that one believes, as Rand does, that it is good and right that people should own land and have dominion over that land which they own, a state university is public property, not private property. She attempts to handwave this with some idea about the owners of the property being the university administration acting on behalf of the general public (despite the fact that the university administration does not in any way answer to the general public or make any effort to represent their will), which is effectively rejecting the inconvenient fact of public property's existence and substituting a construct of ersatz private ownership to continue making her argument.
The fact is, these students were exercising their right to freedom of speech on public property, and the establishment of the time chose to suppress this through the use of violence, triggering a show of physical force in response intended to safeguard the common man against state violence moving forward. The level of contortion, false equivocation, and outright misrepresentation of the facts perpetrated by Rand in an effort to cast this as a violent insurgence of left-wing students against a peaceful society that had done them no wrong is shameful, and the fact that she then uses this warped and twisted narrative to launch attacks on legitimate philosophers is a display of sheer unproductive petulance.
There are still about 10 pages left in Rand's essay, but there's really no point in continuing the analysis past where it's already reached, because she's effectively finished making all of her major points. The final quarter of the essay is comprised of Rand self-indulgently lambasting the F.S.M., mainstream media, and philosophy as a practice for their "anti-rationalism" and "moral cowardice," as she's already done too many times to count, and there's simply not enough substance in that to latch on to. All that can really be taken away from this essay is that Rand's analysis of current events is not to be trusted; not only was she philosophically and politically illiterate, cloaking her unchecked assumptions and outlandish generalizations in pseudointellectual verbosity, she was also willing to outright lie about the facts of the matter in order to smear any one who acted against her puritanical, reactionary goals. In her summary of the F.S.M., she lies about how the administration responded to the demonstrations, commits an absurd number of fallacious rhetorical flourishes in an effort to discredit the movement on aesthetic and moral grounds, and ends up presenting a self-contradictory maelstrom of emotional arguments in lieu of genuine political or philosophical analysis, meandering through unnecessary and irrelevant digressions and creating a piece of writing that is dense in terms of wordcount without providing much in the way of substance, convoluted in structure without offering complexity, and resistant to any attempt at concise criticism simply by virtue of being unapproachably incoherent.
This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or inaccurate summaries of the more relevant facts of the situations, in an attempt to control the reader's developing narrative. For example:
Claiming that their rights had been violated, a small group of "rebels" rallied thousands of students of all political views, including many "conservatives," and assumed the title of the "Free Speech movement." The Movement staged "sit-in" protests in the administration building, and committed other acts of physical force, such as assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum.
Of note: Rand continues to put quotes around "rebels," implying a point that she'll make later, that they are in fact a conformist arm of the intellectual establishment, even in the same sentence in which she describes them as a "small group [who] rallied thousands of students," the implication being that some significant portion of those in attendance acted more as useful idiots than individuals engaging in legitimate political action, underscored by the inclusion of "conservatives," who of course could never have a genuine, principled reason for wishing to engage in free-speech demonstrations alongside radical leftists. She wants to have her cake and eat it too; the rebels are the establishment, we're the underdogs, but also they're really just a small minority group, their views aren't that common (because they're absurd, of course). And finally she summarizes the movement's numerous run-ins with public law enforcement as "assaults on the police and the seizure of a police car for use as a rostrum." Of course, the F.S.M. did famously utilize a police car as a platform from which Mario Savio addressed the crowd; what Rand fails to mention in this summary of the event (or indeed anywhere in the essay) is that the police car in question contained a student who the police were trying to arrest for the crime of setting up an unauthorized table to disseminate unauthorized political views and information. The car wasn't "seized" by a group of unprovoked students who simply wanted something to stand on and shout from, it was obstructed by protestors who were outraged at the sight of an American citizen being arrested for sitting outside a building in a public university and promoting his worldview. The car later being used as a rostrum was simply because it was in the center of the obstructing crowd and therefore a convenient place to stand and address them.
All this may seem pedantic, but it's an important distinction; Rand's framing presents the rioters as an unprovoked, violent force who simply took a police car because they wanted it. The reality of the situation is that the police were obstructed in an act of political violence. The same goes for the "assaults" on the police that Rand references; The F.S.M. was a big event and I have no doubt that at some point in it, there was at least one (and probably more than one) student who decided to attack a police officer unprovoked, but to present this as the framing of the entire situation is simply dishonest. The police acted as an insurgent force against largely non-violent protests, and were met with violent resistance. Are protestors not allowed to defend themselves from the violence of the system?
In fact, Rand continually engages in dishonest apologia for the establishment throughout this piece; not only does she ignore and erase the very real presence of police violence at the campus protests, she essentially whitewashes the university administration's role in all this through the use of lies of omission in her descriptions of their stances. For example, University President Clark Kerr's address to the students and faculty on December 7th is summarized thus:
Kerr attempted to end the rebellion by capitulating: he promised to grant most of the rebels' demands;
What specific demands did he promise to grant? How many, and which, did he not promise to grant? No further details are offered. Just "most of them."
Rand continues:
Whereupon, Mario Savio, the rebel leader, seized the microphone, in an attempt to take over the meeting, ignoring the rules and the fact that the meeting had been adjourned. When he was -- properly -- dragged off the platform, the leaders of the F.S.M. admitted, openly and jubilantly, that they had almost lost their battle, but had saved it by provoking the administration to an act of "violence" (thus admitting that the victory of their publicly proclaimed goals was not the goal of their battle).
There you have it. Kerr went up and promised to meet the demands of the protestors, and in response they attempted to seize the microphone, and later spoke of this capitulation as a danger to their cause. Clearly they never actually wanted their demands met.
Obviously I'm being facetious. Here's the information that Rand has kept from you in order to make her point: the only thing Kerr promised at that address was that F.S.M. protestors who had already been arrested and/or suspended would be granted amnesty for their "crimes" on campus. He maintains that the University will continue to punish students for advocating illegal off-campus political activity. (And, to be clear, "Illegal off-campus political activity" in the 1960s included things like sit-ins and public protests, particularly those supporting the civil rights movements. Remember, the establishment gets to decide what is or isn't legal, and in many cases they decide that whatever is done to change the establishment is illegal. Savio himself took part in the F.S.M. after discovering that advocating for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights organization that practiced nonviolent civil disobedience among other activity, was disallowed under the University's rules.) None of this is a capitulation to the "original goals" of the movement, it's simply an attempt to placate the protestors by dropping the existing charges against them, while reiterating that should they perform similar activities in the future, they will then be punished for doing so. What Kerr was proposing is that both sides simply forget the events of the past several months, and move forward with the existing status quo. Framing this as a "capitulation to the demands of the rebellion" is nonsensical; what was being proposed was a capitulation to the demands of the University administration in exchange for letting the protests which had already occurred slide.
The next major event in the F.S.M. timeline occurred the very next day, when the University's Academic Senate voted 824 to 115 endorsing the F.S.M.'s demand that the University only regulate the time and place of political activity, not the content of the speech or the political causes being advocated.
However, Rand chooses to dedicate the next portion of the essay to the various media responses to the event:
What followed was nationwide publicity, of a peculiar kind. It was a sudden and, seemingly, spontaneous out-pouring of articles, studies, surveys, revealing a strange unanimity of approach in several basic aspects: in ascribing to the F.S.M. the importance of a national movement, unwarranted by the facts -- in blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities -- in granting to the rebels the status of spokesmen for American youth, acclaiming their "idealism" and "commitment" to political action, hailing them as a symptom of the "awakening" of college students from "political apathy." If ever a "puff-job" was done by a major part of the press, this was it.
(Do you see what I mean about Rand being the Sargon of Akkad of the 70s? She's got a similar method of presentation, with overly verbose, meandering prose followed by a short, snippy, dismissive conclusion, to give the impression of intelligence and sophistication, but also directness and spontaneity. Imagine that paragraph being read by Carl Benjamin's pompous British voice, and replace the F.S.M. with some feminist movement or other.)
This digression into the media's "blurring the facts by means of unintelligible generalities" is rich given what we've already seen of Rand's writing on the subject, and indeed she continues to do exactly as she accuses journalists of in the coming paragraphs, when she describes the continued advocacy by some of the proponents of the F.S.M.
Specifically, Rand brings up the post-F.S.M. "Filthy Language Movement," wherein a number of students displayed signs emblazoned with obscenities and in some cases broadcast them over the University PA system, and there are two major issues with how she frames this. Firstly, she presents it as though it's a continuation of the F.S.M., which isn't true, only a small number of F.S.M. participants took part in the Filthy Language Movement and a number of people involved weren't even University students; secondly, she acts as though the fact that these people were publicly saying obscenities is in itself a condemnation.
From here Rand includes several excerpts of editorials and letters to the editor regarding the F.S.M., starting with one sent to The New York Times by a biophysicist working at the University of California; I won't include the entirety of this letter here as it's not particularly relevant, but certain parts of it are simply too amusing not to take this opportunity to look back on 50 years later:
Kerr agreed the university would not control "advocacy of illegal acts," an abstraction until illustrated by examples: In a university lecture hall, a self-proclaimed anarchist advises students how to cheat to escape military service; a nationally known Communist uses the university facilities to condemn our Government in vicious terms for its action in Vietnam, while funds to support the Vietcong are illegally solicited; propaganda for the use of marijuana, with instructions where to buy it, is openly distributed on campus.
Draft dodging?! Defection from imperial American interests?!! Marijuana?!!! Egad! The horror!
Even the abstraction "obscenity" is better understood when one hears a speaker, using the university's amplifying equipment, describe in vulgar words his experiences in group sexual inter course and homosexuality and recommend these practices, while another suggests students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as dogs...
I could not possibly clutch my pearls any harder! Homosexuality? Vulgar words? Sexual freedom? Truly this is the end of civilization as we know it!
Moving on to more relevant pastures, Rand reprints an excerpt from the Columbia University Forum's article, "What's Left at Berkeley," by William Petersen, professor of sociology at Berkeley:
The first fact one must know about the Free Speech Movement is that it has little or nothing to do with free speech.... If not free speech, what then is the issue? In fact, preposterous as this may seem, the real issue is the seizure of power.... [ellipses transcribed as they appear in Rand's printing.]
This is the first paragraph of an excerpt Rand describes as the "clearest account and most perceptive evaluation" of the events at Berkeley, and it borders on a non-sequitur. If one is being suppressed by an established authority who wields social, legal, and economic power over one's self, how is one to go about securing one's freedom without increasing one's power along one or more of these axes? Power is a prerequisite of freedom, and freedom is a form of power. The idea that somewhere there is some sort of "pure" free speech movement which doesn't concern itself with the acquisition of power is absurd, such a movement would get nothing done.
That a tiny number, a few hundred out of a student body of more than 27,000, was able to disrupt the campus is the consequence of more than vigor and skill in agitation. This miniscule group could not have succeeded in getting so many students into motion without three other, at times unwitting, sources of support: off-campus assistance of various kinds, the University administration and the faculty.
Everyone who has seen the efficient, almost military organization of the agitators' program has a reasonable basis for believing that skilled personnel and money are being dispatched into the Berkeley battle.... Around the Berkeley community a dozen "ad hoc committees to support" this or that element of the student revolt sprang up spontaneously, as though out of nowhere.
Petersen's take doesn't become anymore sensible as it continues; he goes on to assume that the F.S.M. must have received outside monetary and organizational support from some presumably wealthy influencer, based solely on the fact that the movement was successful in achieving its goals. This is quite a stretch on its own, but beyond that, isn't it also strange to claim that the movement exists primarily as a power grab, while also suggesting that it was supported and directed by people who already hold societal power? (That's without getting into the fact that, historically speaking, when people start making vague accusations of leftist movements being on the payroll of some indefinite benefactor, they're usually talking about a particular demographic, one that rhymes with "Pews." I'm not necessarily saying that's what Petersen meant, but I am saying that the rhetoric used resembles that enough to make me uncomfortable.)
But the most important reason that the extremists won so many supporters among the students was the attitude of the faculty. Perhaps their most notorious capitulation to the F.S.M. was a resolution passed by the Academic Senate on December 8, by which the faculty notified the campus not only that they supported all of the radicals' demands but also that, in effect, they were willing to fight for them against the Board of Regents, should that become necessary. When that resolution passed by an overwhelming majority -- 824 to 115 votes -- it effectively silenced the anti-F.S.M. student organizations....
And finally, the excerpt reaches its reactionary crescendo. When the school board was actively legislating what political speech is and is not acceptable on campus, there was no free speech concern present there, but when the Academic Senate voted to stop doing that, it amounted to the silencing of those student organizations that disagreed with this decision! This sort of rhetoric is so brazenly self-serving that it hardly even bears discussion. It's incredibly obvious that what Petersen considers to be a concern is built not on a foundation of well-examined principles, but merely in a desire to uphold the status quo. Authoritarian suppression is fine when it supports the status quo, mass civil disobedience is an infringement on others' freedom when it seeks to change the status quo, and the fact that Rand points to this as the definitive media examination of the events at Berkeley underscores the absurd contortions of her position.
Rand then spends some time firing off scattershot comments on various bits and bobs of media coverage and short quotes from F.S.M. participants. It's not really worth going over in any significant detail; Rand reprints a selection of quotes from F.S.M. participants espousing their support for various leftist movements of the time, some praising the Soviet Union and similar establishments, others expressing doubt of any form of statist control, communist or otherwise, after which Rand declares that the activists are militantly anti-ideology, that they refuse any and all labels and conceptualization, choosing instead to focus on the subjectivity of the current moment to the exclusion of all else. Rand is going to say this about people she doesn't like in almost every essay included in this book, and I'm not going to bother to point it out every time because repetition in political writing is incredibly boring, something Rand could've stood to learn. In this particular moment I'd simply point out that several of the students Rand herself quoted described themselves as having a steadfast idea of what they think the world should be, and described socialist countries as being closer to it than capitalist ones, and even the ones that only made oppositional statements were speaking of skepticism of specific ideologies, not of a rejection of the very concept of having a conceptual framework through which to organize one's worldview. Whether you agree with the ideals espoused by these students or not, it's simply dishonest to pretend that they don't have any. You'll just have to take my word that most of the many, many other times Rand lobs this exact accusation at some group she dislikes it's supported in equally flimsy ways.
After quoting several students who espouse some fairly definite ideological grounding for their action, Rand then begins quoting various mainstream media commentators, who all insist that the activists don't have any definite ideological grounding for their action. It seems fairly obvious that the 60s political establishment was simply unequipped to deal with a heterogenous political movement rich with anarchist strains, as they were unable to effectively commentate on the movement without the ability to neatly slot it into an ideological box. Which shouldn't be surprising, since even in this postmodern age of internet politics and disorganized hashtag movements, mainstream media still can't effectively commentate on any movement without the ability to neatly slot it into an ideological box.
With several pages of piecemeal media quotes and spontaneous snipes of commentary in place, Rand rediscovers the point of this exercise, and begins lambasting the media for their failure to unilaterally denounce the F.S.M. without qualification, including one hilarious moment when she emphasizes California Governor Brown's usage of the phrase "idealistic hypocrisy," accusing him of using "idealistic" as a softening qualifier to his accusation of hypocrisy. It's possible that Rand genuinely misunderstood this, English isn't her first language, after all, but given the level of grammatical mastery generally on display in her writing, I think it's far more likely that her incessant need to paint herself as a principled, heroic underdog against an evil and diseased world that systematically favors her ideological enemies led her to intentionally misinterpret what was clearly intended to mean "hypocrisy in one's ideology," not "hypocrisy which is idealistic, that is to say, hopeful." Nevermind the fact that what's being called "hypocrisy" here is the students' decision to pursue action outside the system, from a movement with clear anarchist underpinnings. Calling such a thing hypocritical is an absurd method of criticizing the F.S.M. by someone who clearly feels a need to denounce them but can't find a good reason to do so, even if Rand was right about "idealistic" being used to soften the blow (which I don't think she was).
All that finished, Rand decides to finally stop quoting lines from various articles on the subject and write something herself again;
Now observe that in all that mass of comments, appraisals and interpretations (including the ponderous survey in Newsweek which offered statistics on every imaginable aspect of college life) not one word was said about the content of modern education, about the nature of the ideas that are being inculcated by today's universities. Every possible question was raised and considered, except: What are the students taught to think? This, apparently, was what no one dared to discuss.
This is what we shall now proceed to discuss. [Emphasis Rand's]
Already Rand's analysis has hit a snag; clearly, judging by context, the specific college courses she intends to discuss are philosophy courses, (one assumes that the engineering curriculum is unlikely to have much bearing on a political movement, after all,) yet the way she frames this is by asking what "content" is being put into students' heads, what "ideas are they taught to think"? This, of course, is not the purpose of a philosophy course, it's not how that works. Philosophy education serves 2 primary purposes: To expose students to a wide history of philosophical ideas, both sound and unsound, in order to give them proper context both for modern philosophy and for their own future endeavors in the field (this is why philosophy courses still teach Plato's allegory of the cave and his theory of the World of Forms, despite the former having little direct utility save as a convenient metaphor for explaining a number of philosophical ideas to laymen, and the latter being an unsubstantiated metaphysical hypothesis which nobody really puts stock in these days) and to acquaint students with the sorts of epistemological techniques that are useful in philosophizing. The courses don't teach students what to think, they provide them with a number of worldviews and teach them how to appraise them and develop their own.
Before getting into the meat of her philosophical criticism, Rand makes a short digression to channel Carl Benjamin again:
These "activists" are so fully, literally, loyally, devastatingly the products of modern philosophy that someone should cry to all the university administrations and faculties: "Brothers, you asked for it!"
She then spends a few paragraphs using viscerally emotive language to describe her ideological opponents as toxic and cancerous, which I'll do you a favor and skip.
With rare and academically neglected exceptions, the philosophical "mainstream" that seeps into every classroom, subject and brain in today's universities, is: epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism. Our age is witnessing the ultimate climax, the cashing-in on a long process of destruction, at the end of the road laid out by Kant.
Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established a range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it further and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-episotemology of shyster lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system -- by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true -- in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than-air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man's existence.
There's a lot to unpack here. First, the idea that Kant "divorced reason from reality" is at best a grave oversimplification of Kant's work. It might be more accurate to say that he divorced perception from reality, by pointing out that human beings don't directly experience "things in themselves" as they exist, but rather experience a composite representation of the world around them built by their mind. Which is difficult to argue with; in a world where perception varies heavily from person to person, where the blind and the deaf exist, where any number of substances or mental illnesses or even just being asleep could cause a person to hallucinate, literally experiencing a different world than what everybody around them is experiencing, how can anyone claim to be directly experiencing the one, true, objective reality? To do so would be an act of absurd egotism.
But this characterization of Kant is easily forgivable in light of the wholesale misrepresentation of pragmatism; It's true that the pragmatist definition of truth doesn't conform to the hard and fast "objective perception of reality with my eyes (specifically mine, not yours)" viewpoint espoused by Rand, but it's far from the ephemeral, self-congratulatory exercise she makes it out to be. One of the prerequisites for an idea to be "true" according to William James is that it be verifiable, that is to say, it needs to be something that can be checked against one's own past perceptions and the present perceptions of one's peers, and shown to be in keeping with the established pattern, and pragmatism's more general idea of truth can be (over)simplified as that which aids in one's continual attempts to manipulate the world around you through pattern recognition and prediction. In fact this view is remarkably similar to a lot of Rand's own ideology; the difference merely lies in the pragmatists' acknowledgement that this can create some strange results in places and that there's room for significant doubt as to the objectivity of any "truth" reached in this way, whereas Rand steadfastly insists that that which she perceives and which aids her in making predictions and manipulating her environment is universally and objectively correct. She lambasts other philosophers for simply acknowledging the limitations of their own human perception, even when the practical results of their ideas are nearly identical to her own.
She then goes on to describe her perception of Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, but since she describes both as extensions of pragmatism and she clearly either doesn't understand pragmatism or is lying about it, is it really necessary to go into the further flawed conclusions she extrapolated from this flawed premise?
No matter how cautiously the proponents of such theories skirted any reference to the relationship between theory and practice, no matter how coyly they struggled to treat philosophy as a parlor or classroom game -- the fact remained that young people went to college for the purpose of acquiring theoretical knowledge to guide them in practical action. Philosophy teachers evaded questions about the application of their ideas to reality, by such means as declaring that "reality is a meaningless term," or by asserting that philosophy has no purpose other than the amusement of manufacturing arbitrary "constructs," or by urging students to temper every theory with "common sense" -- the common sense they had spent countless hours trying invalidate.
As a result, a student came out of a modern university with the following sediment left in his brain by his four to eight years of study: existence is an uncharted, unknowable jungle, fear and uncertainty are man's permanent state, skepticism is the mark of maturity, cynicism is the mark of realism and, above all, the hallmark of an intellectual is the denial of the intellect.
Again, this is a gross oversimplification of the philosophy of the time, being presented as an objective, factual account of it; when the early 20th-century philosophical movements which laid the groundwork for what would become known as postmodernism suggest that intellectualism is not in itself any proof of the validity of one's views, and point out that opposing viewpoints with equal amounts of veracity in evidence can be found outside of intellectual circles, Rand caricatures this as "the denial of intellect." When these movements suggest that one has no ironclad evidence that one is truly perceiving the world as it is, Rand interprets this as "fear and uncertainty" being "man's permanent state." All Rand is doing when she philosophizes is rationalizing her own limited perspective in a desperate attempt to stave off ego death; Her philosophical contemporaries, in pointing out that nobody's perspective is universal, threatened her self-image as an objective, rational actor, and so she interprets their claims as attacks on the very idea of intellect, which she conflates with herself, and this "attack" scares her, so she comes to understand them as a philosophy of fear.
Now that she's thoroughly misrepresented the state of mid-20th century philosophy, Rand sets about explaining how the F.S.M. is in fact an extension of that philosophy, and therefore isn't really a rebellion because it adheres to what is commonly accepted in a particular, limited area of society (remember, that's the thesis in the title):
If these activists choose the policy of "doing and then reflecting on your doing" -- hasn't Pragmatism taught them that truth is to be judged by consequences? If they "seem unable to formulate or sustain a systematized political theory of society," yet shriek with moral righteousness that they propose to achieve their social goals by physical force -- hasn't Logical Postivism taught them that ethical propositions have no cognitive meaning and are merely a report on one's feelings or the equivalent of emotional ejaculations? If they are savagely blind to everything but the immediate moment -- hasn't Logical Postivism taught them that nothing else can be claimed with certainty to exist? And while the Linguistic Analysts are busy demonstrating that "The cat is on the mate" does not mean that "the mat" is an attribute of "the cat," nor that "on-the-mat" is the genus to which "the cat" belongs, nor yet that "the-cat" equals "on-the-mat" -- is it any wonder that students storm the Berkeley campus with placards inscribed "Strike now, analyze later"? (This slogan is quoted by Professor Petersen in the Columbia University Forum.)
Rand is yet again grossly oversimplifying and exaggerating the views of her ideological opponents; The phrase "Strike now, analyze later" is not a rejection of analysis, or a claim that there is no truth to know which could possibly inform actions, it's saying that the current situation is so odious that taking action to change it takes precedence over theoretically analyzing it. What these students are saying isn't that philosophy is worthless, but that there should be priorities, and changing the current, broken system is a higher priority than having conversations about the meaning of life. None of the rest of this paragraph really bears response, because "Strike now, analyze later" is the only quote from the F.S.M. included in it. The rest are quotes from various mainstream media outlets, describing their perception of the F.S.M. We're multiple layers removed from the actual views of the F.S.M. here, where Rand is criticizing her extrapolation of a mainstream pundit's misinterpretation of the F.S.M.'s ideals.
In the next paragraph she takes a sharp turn into discussing CBS's documentary, The Berkeley story, and for a refreshing change of pace she decides to respond to quotes from participants interviewed instead of simply taking journalists' analyses at face value.
"Our generation has no ideology," declared the first boy interviewed, in the tone of defiance and hatred once reserved for saying: "Down with Wall Street!" -- clearly projecting that the enemy now is not the "Robber Barons," but the mind. The older generation, he exlpained scornfully, had "a neat little pill" to solve everything, but the pill didn't work and they merely "got their hearts busted." "We don't believe in pills," he said.
Did you catch the sleight of hand there? Rand sneakily takes it as read that a repudiation of formal ideology is an attack on the mind itself, which is of course absurd. The person being quoted even clarified that what he was referring to with the phrase "ideology" is the idea that one can have a clean, pre-packaged worldview that will serve them in all cases and never require updating, a "neat little pill."
An intense young girl who talked volubly, never quite finishing a sentence nor making a point, was denouncing society in general, trying to say that since people are social products, society has done a bad job. In the middle of a sentence, she stopped and threw in, as a casual aside: "Whatever way I turn out, I still am a product," then went on. She said it with the simple earnestness of a conscientious child acknowledging a self-evident fact of nature. It was not an act: the poor little creature meant it.
Does this really bear analysis? Do I really need to explain why Rand being dismissive of the idea that the society one grows up in is a significant determinant in what kind of person they end up being is a ridiculous thing to do? Is any reasonable person going to fight my assertion that this is absurd? In fact, it's also directly contradictory to the core point of a later essay in this book, which I will not be covering because it's absurdly long and would require a lot of research into accepted preschool practices in the 1960s, "The Comprachicos," wherein she claims that progressive day cares and preschools of the time (and higher education too) are designed to mentally and emotionally cripple their wards, and that the damage done is often irreversible. What is this if not a claim that an individual's personality is often subject to the environment in which they live?
Such are the products of modern philosophy. They are the type of students who are too intelligent not to see the logical consequences of the theories they have been taught -- but not intelligent nor independent enough to see through the theories and reject them.
So they scream their defiance against "The System," not realizing that they are its most consistently docile pupils, that theirs is a rebellion against the status quo by its archetypes, against the intellectual "Establishment" by its robots who have swallowed every shopworn premise of the "liberals" of the 1930s, including the catchphrases of altruism, the dedication to "deprived people," to such a safely conventional cause as "the war on poverty." A rebellion that brandishes banners inscribed with bromides is not a very convincing nor very inspiring sight.
And finally, we hit the thesis alluded to in the title, that the "rebels" are in fact merely conforming to the existing status quo. This claim is made by simply conflating a number of establishments into a single entity; the intellectual establishment as represented by philosophy professors, the administrative establishment as represent by government and the college administration, and the social establishment as represented by the general cultural zeitgeist. The problem is that none of these are the same as each other. It's true that the intelligentsia of the time was broadly sympathetic to the F.S.M., and the F.S.M. never claimed to be rebelling against their philosophy professors. They were rebelling against the government, the college administration, and the goddamn police that were arresting them for handing out pamphlets and criticizing the US government, and more broadly they were rebelling against the cultural zeitgeist that viewed this as "acceptable" simply because it was "normal." Simply pointing out that the "so-called "rebels" at Berkeley" do in fact think things and agree with some of their teachers is not a meaningful criticism of the movement, nor does it significantly contradict the general perception of the movement as countercultural.
Rand then spends several pages reiterating that it's really the fault of the intellectual elites that all these horrible protests against reactionary and imperialist ideals are going on, which I'll skip for the sake of cutting down the already absurd amount of time this post is taking to write, and move on to what Rand regards as the "true goals" of the unnamed, vaguely defined "outside forces" who are definitely not cultural marxists, which is definitely not a euphemism for "jews";
The main issue was the attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool of political action. This attempt has been made repeatedly in connection with the civil rights movement. But there the issue was confused by the fact that the Negroes were the victims of legalized injustice and, therefore, the matter of breaching legality did not become unequivocally clear. The country took it as a fight for justice, not as an assault on the law.
Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual sees an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.
But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others -- regardless of whether the demonstrators' goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob's defiance of legality as such.
The forcible occupation of another man's property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a "sit-in" in the home or office of a person he disagrees with -- and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers -- and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength -- i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes -- the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others -- loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.
There are a couple issues here, not least of which being Rand's demand for "respect for legality," which aside from being lame as fuck is also at odds with most of her egoist philosophy; legality as a concept is the right of the sovereign to dictate what actions are and are not allowed in society, and in practice is the primary means through which political violence is exercised, justified, and normalized. Rand desperately wants to cast a student sitting at a table handing out pamphlets when they were told not to as some heinous abuse of physical force against surrounding society, a morally bankrupt exercise in intimidation, but the system which maintains societal order does so exclusively through intimidation.
What Rand (and, to be fair, a lot of other pundits) are either unaware of or willfully ignoring is that politics itself is, among other things, the process of determining when and how violence is to be utilized. The fact that the violence perpetrated on dissenters by the police is broadly accepted as "normal" doesn't make it not violent, nor does it make it acceptable. The idea that whether the use of violent coercion is moral or not is determined by whether it adheres to existing cultural norms is repugnant, as is any other standard which accepts or rejects violence on any terms other than whether it serves to support or suppress future violence.
And once you've addressed the fact that governing bodies are indeed inherently violent entities, there comes a need to examine the scale, degree, and type of violence being perpetrated by each party, in addition to the motives, and once one does it becomes clear that to even compare the two is almost comical; The establishment perpetrates an intensive degree of direct, physical, often lethal violence on a nationwide scale in the interest of maintaining itself, which is to say preserving its ability to continue to perpetrate the same degree of direct, physical, often lethal violence on the same scale or an even larger one. The actions of the F.S.M. I'm hesitant to even call violent as I would argue it somewhat degrades the term.
Rand disagrees, arguing that it represents an infringement on inalienable property rights through the use of physical force and is therefore an act of violence. There's a pretty obvious problem here in that, assuming that one believes, as Rand does, that it is good and right that people should own land and have dominion over that land which they own, a state university is public property, not private property. She attempts to handwave this with some idea about the owners of the property being the university administration acting on behalf of the general public (despite the fact that the university administration does not in any way answer to the general public or make any effort to represent their will), which is effectively rejecting the inconvenient fact of public property's existence and substituting a construct of ersatz private ownership to continue making her argument.
The fact is, these students were exercising their right to freedom of speech on public property, and the establishment of the time chose to suppress this through the use of violence, triggering a show of physical force in response intended to safeguard the common man against state violence moving forward. The level of contortion, false equivocation, and outright misrepresentation of the facts perpetrated by Rand in an effort to cast this as a violent insurgence of left-wing students against a peaceful society that had done them no wrong is shameful, and the fact that she then uses this warped and twisted narrative to launch attacks on legitimate philosophers is a display of sheer unproductive petulance.
There are still about 10 pages left in Rand's essay, but there's really no point in continuing the analysis past where it's already reached, because she's effectively finished making all of her major points. The final quarter of the essay is comprised of Rand self-indulgently lambasting the F.S.M., mainstream media, and philosophy as a practice for their "anti-rationalism" and "moral cowardice," as she's already done too many times to count, and there's simply not enough substance in that to latch on to. All that can really be taken away from this essay is that Rand's analysis of current events is not to be trusted; not only was she philosophically and politically illiterate, cloaking her unchecked assumptions and outlandish generalizations in pseudointellectual verbosity, she was also willing to outright lie about the facts of the matter in order to smear any one who acted against her puritanical, reactionary goals. In her summary of the F.S.M., she lies about how the administration responded to the demonstrations, commits an absurd number of fallacious rhetorical flourishes in an effort to discredit the movement on aesthetic and moral grounds, and ends up presenting a self-contradictory maelstrom of emotional arguments in lieu of genuine political or philosophical analysis, meandering through unnecessary and irrelevant digressions and creating a piece of writing that is dense in terms of wordcount without providing much in the way of substance, convoluted in structure without offering complexity, and resistant to any attempt at concise criticism simply by virtue of being unapproachably incoherent.
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