For years, Rand’s message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled “do-gooders,” who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.”In spite of the association of Rand with capitalism, I've never seen a conflict between being a flaming liberal and a capitalist pig. Rationally, it seems like to me it's ultimately in my capitalist interest (and the interest of my kids) for there to be an empowered middle class in this country. It seems like to me for that to happen we have to think about how we continue to build and empower that middle class. Government policies are at the heart of that. It's not something that a completely laissez faire free market approach results in, at least from my perspective. Rand-worshipping libertarians (and lord knows there are a ton of them in the technology world), many of whose schooling was underwritten by government loans and research programs, are particularly tiresome to me. It's that "I have mine, screw the rest of the world" attitude that is the dead give away.
In contrast, we now get the view that we have baked into our genetic makeup a desire to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The emphasis we put on the various aspects of so-called moral behavior is, as you might expect, different between liberals and conservatives.
See, Rand was fighting our genetic predisposition to resist selfishness. Food for thought anyway.Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at www.YourMorals.org.)
They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.
Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals.
More good news: you Paul Krugman fans can now read him without the for-pay TimesSelect subscription.
3 comments:
After that rant and my comment about TimesSelect (pay version of NYTimes online) being gone and Paul Krugman being available now, I see he has a new blog. His initial post did a much more coherent job of capturing what I was trying to say in my post.
I think most people grow out of that phase of Ayn Rand worship. But you don't forget her message.
As for inequality, I've been interested in some longitudinal studies that show the people who were on the bottom of the pile a few years ago have come up the ladder, and their place at the bottom has been taken by others. I think that says something about opportunity in the USA.
Like most people in the US, I think of this as the land of opportunity. However, it's not that simple, and in fact while that belief is very widely held by Americans, it's not that clear when you look at the data. Check out this (pdf) report if you're interested in the combined view from (strange bedfellows) Brookings, AEI, Heritage, and the Urban Institute. The bottom line is that economic mobility, "the ability to move up the economic ladder within a lifetime or from one generation to the next," looks to be seriously suffering. There will be follow-on reports that might be of interest to you as well.
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