Who is {yer mom}?

I found this today. It's very funny. You should go read it, especially if you want any context for the rest of this post.

While I'm waiting for you to finish, I'll share a few of my favorite passages therefrom. Here's one:

The argument we had earlier today didn't need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I'm deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

Here's another:

You should never feel guilty about your abilities. Including your ability to repeatedly peg a fellow toddler with your Elmo ball as he sobs for mercy.

And another:

Johanna shouldn't be burdened with supplying playthings for every bed-wetting moocher she happens to meet. If you saw Johanna, her knees buckling, her arms trembling but still trying to hold aloft the collective weight of an entire Tot Lot's worth of Elmo balls with the last of her strength, what would you tell her to do?

To shrug. Just like we've instructed her to do if Child Protective Services or some other agent of the People's State of America ever asks her about what we're teaching her.

Comedy gold.

Of course this little piece is satire, and satire is never fair to its object, but it got me thinking about Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which in our current political climate and Web 2.0-enabled world have experienced a miniature renaissance—at least, if Facebook is to be believed. Even more than Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand is the patron saint of capitalism, and her Objectivism is the philosophical creed of choice for hordes of libertarians from here to the Cato Institue.

So lately I've spent a reasonable amount of time learning about Objectivism. Full disclosure: I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, but I have read quite a few secondary sources, including an interesting article on Objectivist themes in Pixar's The Incredibles. I also read Anthem many, many years ago. In any case, here is a one-sentence summary of my findings:

Objectivism is religion for atheists.

Honestly, that should suffice—if you want to close your browser window and move on, you won't miss too much. There aren't even any good jokes from here on out. But for completeness I'll move on to a multi-sentence discussion. First, let me give a brief—but I think fair—summary of Objectivism's core principles for anyone who may not be familiar:

1. There exists an objective reality distinct from human subjectivity.
2. Through logic and perceptual apparatus, humans can obtain objective knowledge of that reality.
3. The correct purpose of a person's life is to go about pursuing one's self-interest.
4. The only political system compatible with that correct purpose is classical, laissez-faire capitalism.

I reserve most of my ire for (2), both for its own sake and because it reeks rather pungently of having been reverse-engineered from desired conclusions (3) and (4). If you have sufficient intelligence and patience, Rand argues, you can possess objective, absolute truth about the world. It's a wonderful ideal, one shared to various degrees by a smattering of scientists and philosophers. In an ideal world, reason ought to be enough to lead us surely and inexorably down the path to Truth.

But people aren't very good at being Spockian vessels of dispassionate logic. In fact, we basically can't do it. For all its marvelous complexity, the human brain is pretty shoddy as an objective device. It naturally tries to confirm its preconceptions. It's very bad with probabilities. The full list of cognitive biases runs a mile long, and no one is immune. Even if you neglect the usual epistemelogical hurdles of Cartesian doubt or the analytic-synthetic distinction, the arrogance required to believe that subjective bias does not apply to you, that you can carry out purely objective reasoning, is staggering. (Indeed, Rand does ignore these hurdles—in fact, she considered Kant "the most evil man in history". A rare specimen of objectivity, ladies and gentlemen.)

If we really want to be rational and intellectually honest, let's just admit it: obtaining objective, non-trivial knowledge through logical inquiry is essentially impossible. But Rand won't admit that. In fact, she can't admit it, because doing so would force her to abandon her philosophical (um) objectives. She is not content to argue that rational self-interest is neat or that capitalism is pretty okay. She wants to enshrine self-interest as the only moral purpose in life and laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system. And you can't make absolute moral statements if you've given up on absolute truth.

Here's where I stop merely criticizing and start losing my patience with Objectivism. If you want to argue for individualism or extol the heroism of human ingenuity, you'll find in me a sympathetic audience. If you want to argue for the supremacy of laissez-faire capitalism, we can probably find common ground. But don't try to tell me these are moral absolutes. I will laugh at you.

That brings me back to my one-sentence summary. Objectivism offers the atheist the same thing religion offers the believer: absolute knowledge about the world and an inviolable moral code. Rand may have dispensed with religious belief, but she engineered a dogma as rigid as any religious creed. In trying to eliminate subjectivity, she ended up elevating her subjective conclusions to an objective reality. Anyone who disagrees with her would-be objectivism, then, must somehow be doing it wrong. And for some reason that sounds a little familiar.