Ayn Rand's Attack on Christian Morality

Ayn Rand's Attack on Christian Morality | James Kidd | April 14, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

The April 15 release of the film Atlas Shrugged: Part I brings the Russian-born novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982) back into the spotlight. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged (1957), continues to sell more than half a century after its publication. The novel even topped Amazon.com's fiction sales at one point in 2009 and is required reading among Tea Party activists.[1] Staffers at the libertarian Cato Institute who have not read the novel are called "virgins."

But orthodox Catholics have a love/hate relationship with Rand. Political conservatives, with whom they traditionally align, find much to like in Rand's writings on government and economics. Few have made the case for limited government as persuasively and intelligently as Rand.

But Rand's views on organized religion, making it the major villain of history, gives pause to many religious conservatives. Her diatribes against religion often border on the delirious. Catholics might be surprised to learn, then, that Objectivist ethics is actually reconcilable with Catholic teaching.

Rand's "Selfishness" Defined

Objectivist ethics is defined more by what it opposes than what it proposes. In Rand's view, the entirety of the world's problems can be traced back to altruism, which she defines as "the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self." What's wrong with that? "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption."[2]

Rand believes that there are two classes of people: the "creators" (inventors, intellectuals, businessmen, and all others who use their minds to create something useful) and those she calls looters or second-handers, inferior beings who spend their pitiful lives mooching off the creators and their creations like parasites.

According to Rand, "looters" have always been around and have always been dependent on the kindness and compassion of the creators for their own sustenance. But centuries ago, the looters made the creators' benevolence toward them obligatory. In other words, one man's need placed a moral burden on the one who had the resources to relieve it. Ever since then, anything and everything the creators produced was claimed as the rightful property of everyone else. Thus was born the evil of altruism.

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