Why I can’t buy into Ayn Rand (Part 2)

Honestly, I’m rather bothered by the numbers of Christians who are racing to embrace Rand’s economics while supposedly bypassing her philosophy.  I don’t think we can really separate the two.

Let me tackle just a few of her ideas that I find unbiblical….. or at least “sketchy”:

America was built on individualistic pioneers who said “Piss off!” to the British (or Irish or Germans or French or whatever) and came to these shores to build a new life for themselves and — especially — to be left alone.  The Puritans touted a work ethic to make oneself holy; the Scots-Irish fled into the Appalachian hills to find solitude; the wagon trains took hearty adventurers and those hungry for ownership into the West where land was nearly free.

No wonder Ayn Rand found America a balm after she watched communism and socialism eat up her family’s wealth in Russia.  Her Objectivism, steeped in Enlightenment rationalism and ideals, fits here perfectly alongside our Declaration of Independence, social-contract theory of government, and Deistic perspective on man’s “natural” rights.

I’m proud of my American heritage ….  of my Italian grandfather who came through Ellis Island as a boy in the early 1900s to suffer in poverty until he scraped enough to get by …. of my childhood in the Pennsylvania mountains surrounded by people whose ancestors came to the hills in the 1780s and still shot anyone who tried to worm their way into those closed communities.  Well, I’m not “proud of” the mountain people; they were weird. lol  But my point isn’t to be un-American.

However, Americanism =/= biblical morality.  We Americans think the individual is king.

Biblically speaking, that’s just crap.

The Church, the family, the government — these institutions founded by God in the early days of the human race are entirely build on community.  I’m nothing in isolation.  As a Christian, my place in the Body is what helps give my life direction.  As an image-bearer, my humanity is unpacked and expanded only when I am in community with other image-bearers.  A solitary human being is a sad soul. Don’t believe me? Read Into the Wild (or watch the film).

Americans lose so much because we throw our old people into homes to die alone; we move billions of miles away from anyone who matters to us; we live in disconnected little boxes in subdivisions where nobody knows their neighbors anymore.  I remember hearing some Germans describe how sad they were that no one in their Greenville neighborhood would make friends with them.  All we could say was, “Well, that’s America. Everybody drives home from work, straight into the garage, shuts the door, and cuts off the world.”

Self-success is the natural corollary of individualism.  If I’m selfishly looking out for myself above all (as Rand suggests), then I’m going to be able to put all of my resources into making myself successful. Self-development becomes THE goal.

People who latch on to individualism as a core economic principle want to use it for some pretty nasty ends when it comes to economic theory: They beat down those who do not succeed by blaming them for that failure (“If you’d worked harder, you would have made it!”). They condemn those who are poor for being moral failures (“Poverty is the result of indigence, laziness, or maybe bad luck….but mostly laziness.”)

And they violently oppose anyone who tries to make a claim on their economic success.  Some will be generous, but few are willing to have generosity thrust upon them.

Looking at Christ’s intensification of the Law in the Gospels and Paul’s expansion of that theme in his Epistles, generosity should be a hallmark of Christian living. Where God demanded 10% of the Israelite’s harvests in order to support the Old Testament temple system, He now seems to expect that we use all of our wealth and talents for Kingdom living!  Shocking.

Because we are blinded by American values rather than biblical ones, we compartmentalize “ministry” into a little box that fits into Sunday morning (when we work a nursery room) and Thursday afternoons (when we take food to a local charity).  The rest of our lives are “ours”; as long as God gets His tithe check on Sundays we’re home free.

The dust-up about Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech reveals the bitter truth about our hearts.  If I truly see my wealth and my job and my paycheck and even my ability to earn money in this capitalistic system as gifts from God to be used entirely for making this planet a better place to live in, why would I so violently spit out curses when someone suggests that I didn’t do this on my own?

This is what King David prayed to the Lord after the people opened their hearts (and proverbial wallets) to bring offerings for use in the building of the Temple:

The whole passage is powerful. NOTHING I own is mine. I can’t give away a single thing (or pay taxes on it, or invest it, or waste it on hamburgers) that God hasn’t already given to me first.

The idea that I build my own wealth by the sweat of my brow is true to the extent that this sin-cursed world yields profit only by the sweat of my brow. But that’s not the whole story.

Any attitude toward my personal wealth which resembles a toddler hoarding candy and throwing a tantrum on the floor “It’s mine! I don’t have to share!” is an ugly and debased view of economics.  Sharing, charity, and economic aid for those who are in need must be components of any biblical economic system — which directly contradicts Ayn Rand’s worship of the self as highest good.

I keep saying “no-rules-capitalism” because I can’t spell liaissaiz-faire. lol

Anyway….

We are greedy people at heart.  I can feel the selfishness rising up in my throat anytime someone starts cutting cake and I start watching the size of the slices.

Unbridled capitalism in the 1800s and poorly-regulated in the 1900s gave us environmental disasters, needless destruction of usable land or beautiful places, extinct species, chemical and other byproducts polluting water and air, oppressive labor conditions, no sympathy for people injured at work, virtual enslavement of women and children in Northern factories, actual enslavement of blacks to work Southern plantations followed by a horrific sharecropping system of similar effect, violent clashes between poor and underpaid workers and rich bosses/company owners.  Those abuses were correctly only through anti-trust laws, government agencies like the FDA and EPA, unions, and consumer watchdog groups.  Some of those reactions have now outlived their own usefulness and become problematic too, but the point remains.

I grew up near Pittsburgh; I saw the photos of the smoky city with its black atmosphere in the 60s. I’ve had my lungs burned by breathing polluted air around Moscow, Russia. My dad remembered the union strikes at the Pittsburgh steel mills in the 30s and 50s when workers couldn’t stand the wage differences between the guys doing the work and the managers at the top. He lost his job when he went blind in one eye in 1981 and overnight my family was plunged into economic hardship that never really let up. My parents were born into abject poverty during the Depression and they died only a little better off.

People with power (whether economic, political, military) do not just “give up” that power. It must be taken from them — usually through legislation or policy changes.  Obamacare isn’t just “socialized medicine”; it’s an attempt to staunch the bleeding of billions of dollars of unpaid medical care dumped into insurance premium hikes because people can’t afford to buy insurance.

Right now a tiny fraction of people control the overwhelming portion of wealth and investments. I’m not a fan of wealth redistribution. But historically speaking, things don’t turn out well once the scales get too imbalanced.  Rich people have no incentive to make the poor better off, as this article suggests:

*****

Rand suggests that humans live to please themselves, work to stuff themselves, and become prosperous for their own enjoyment.

Christ said, “If any man would follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  That doesn’t mean I am not allowed to own anything.  But it sure does mean that loving God with my money and loving others with my wealth is the hallmark of a biblical economic system.

…and I’m not hearing that in Ayn Rand.

Combine her selfish economics with basic social Darwinism and you get the same attitude that many have toward the poor, needy, or immigrant:  “It’s your own damn fault. Sucks to be you.”