Thanks a ton to those of you who set aside time to think about Bernstein's article and respond so thoughtfully. Keep 'em coming!
Erika
this from Charlotte Poe:
FTVC [Freethinkers of Ventura County] is proud to have Andrew Lewis, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, as our speaker for our February 14th meeting. His topic: "The Cancer of Government Health Care -- And The Free Market Cure." (Andrew is also executive director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.)
The article you forwarded is a "godsend" (pardon my French) for me. For years, I have been trying to articulate my arguments to Christians -- especially Christian Libertarians (an oxymoron if ever there was one) -- that Capitalism and Christianity are mutually exclusive. I plan to publish this article in one of my upcoming Freethinker of Ventura County (CA) newsletters.
Religion, specifically Christian theology, includes two peculiar political stands with which I disagree: (1) Pacifism. and (2) Anti-wealth. I'll leave discussions on pacifism for another time.
As for its anti-wealth aspect (inherited largely from Judaism) I believe this to be an artifact of Biblical times and societies. Those Middle Eastern societies were pre-industrial, agricultural societies with very few ways of generating new wealth. Therefore, any truly wealthy man (such as the man who asked Jesus how to get to heaven) was assumed to have gotten his wealth by personally taking it from others or by inheriting it from an ancestor who stole from others. Economics was a zero-sum game. By standards of those times such judgments were almost certainly accurate.
But technology marched on and generated industrial societies--the first societies ever known to produce prodigious amounts of new wealth. Our post-industrial, information society (Third Wave, in Toffler's terminology) is even more fecund.
Christian theology has failed miserably to keep up with technological developments in various disciplines and areas of life, and their profoundly revolutionary effects on social conditions--for example, the resulting growth of democratic capitalism in the West and in the Far East. The growth of capitalism went on to stimulate the further growth of technology--and so on. All those inventors. All those marketers. Capitalism and technology continue to grow in a mutual catalyzing upward spiral of development to which Christian thought is blind. Christian anti-wealth rhetoric can be seen as one aspect of theological intellectual failure.
Freedom and religion have traditionally been at odds, nowhere more so than in economics. Religion calls for top-down, hierarchical decision-making processes in all aspects of life, especially in how goods and services are made and distributed, as opposed to the freely established, self-organizing networks of exchange characteristic of capitalist societies. Combine that fact with the anti-wealth statements found in the Bible, and you will find an irresistable theological call to the religous-minded for the establishment of socialist societies and economies--nevermind that none have ever been found to work. The best that can be said about them is they've made members of socialist societies equal--equally poor.
Free universe, free societies, free minds. Libertarian thought links naturally with nonreligous thought. I agree with Bernstein's essay. My only criticism is the lack of historical context in it.
The social and economic philosophy that Bernstein advances is just as extreme as the socialism it decries. It elevates the wellbeing of the individual over the wellbeing of the community. If one individual can, for example, pollute our water and air just so that he or she can accumulate massive wealth, I cannot support that program. Nor can i support any program that champions what John Dewey called "freedom from" while ignoring what he called "freedom for". That is, freedom from religious tyranny is no more important than freedom for equal opportunity (not necessarily equal achievement). A society such as ours where about 20% of the population is caught in grinding poverty while others gain great wealth is not a balanced arrangment of freedoms.
I agree that individual freedom is important but so is the freedom and the wellbeing of the entire community of human beings. To be a humanist means to me to use human effort--as opposed to appealing to supernatural forces--to strive to advance the human condition both individually and as a society. I don't see how that would be possible by ignoring the community and making the individual sacred. I don't know just where the balance between them should lie, but I think we should keep looking for it. Berstein seems to have no interest in that balance: it is the individual uber alles.
The fact that Ayn Rand was an atheist does not, in my estimation, automatically render all the rest of her philosophy as acceptable. Objectivism is nothing more than the glorification of utter selfishness.
It has been said that the birth of anyone on this earth takes away, to some extent, our ability and right to act as we please. The more people on this planet with limited resources requires the need for the very opposite of what Rand stands for, a scientific and humanistic approach to the more equitable distribution of the earth's resources.
Unfortunately, the more people, the more need for more government. We no longer live in a time when most people lived on farms and were more or less able to support themselves, living off the land. We have,now, most people crowded in polluted urban areas. One of the highest ideals of Humanism is caring for OTHERS, an ideology foreign to Objectivists.
Not all atheists deserve our admiration or support. Ayn Rand is one of those who doesn't....and the life and memory of Joseph Stalin is another.