Poolesville Presbyterian Church
09.09.12; Rev. David Williams
It’s all good.
I’ve heard that saying many a time, pitched out into the churn of Facebook. No matter what, that pattern of thought goes, things are fine. Everything contributes. Everything you say or believe or do contributes to the overall goodness of things, so...it’s all good. Let’s just all get along, and be fine with everything, because really, what does it matter?
The pesky thing is, that isn’t actually true. It can’t all be good, because we don’t always quite agree on what good is. For a resident of New Orleans, for example, a 47 point Saints blowout today, including administering an NFL record thirteen consecutive sacks torn through an offensive line with the consistency of wet tissue paper, that would be a good thing. For some of my fellow Washingtonians, that might be considered not quite so good.
Goodness and the measure of what is best in life aren’t something we always agree upon. Sometimes, those disagreements are trivial. Sometimes, we can find a common good that we all agree upon. But other times, they can’t be resolved. Some ways of looking at the world simply can’t be reconciled with others.
Take the section of the Book of James we heard from this morning. Last week, I talked about the significance of James as perhaps the most practical book of the New Testament, dedicated almost in its entirety to the moral and ethical “so what” of Christian faith. It’s a book of wisdom, one that takes the essential teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and explains what that’s going to mean in your everyday life.
What is good for James is as straightforward as a two-by-four applied directly to your forehead. In a nutshell, goodness is defined as actual, material, and physical obedience to what James describes as the “royal law.” What is good is loving your neighbor as yourself. Period. By that, James does not mean love as an abstraction, or love as some distant, squishy, ethereal concept.
Throughout the letter of James, what is most significant is a compassion that directly acts, and a depth of valuing other human beings that shows no partiality. This is, for James, for Paul, and for Christ, the essence of what it means to be good.
But there are other, competing value sets out there in the world.
One significant case in point that’s surfaced in political conversations over the last few years has been the political and personal philosophy of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand. I realize that in our current culture, even using the word “philosophy” has a tendency to make eyes glaze over. This is not, after all, an era in which people gather on streetcorners to debate philosophy. This is the era of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which I’m sure would be charming if I could bring myself to stop blacking out whenever it comes on. Pesky, pesky mental defenses.
But the funny thing about philosophy is that it defines us. The peculiar thing about believing something is that that belief tends to have direct, material, and very real consequences. Ideas shape who we become, because they lay out the foundation which guides our actions. And Rand, well, her ideas have gotten a whole lot of play lately.
For the better part of fifty years, Ayn Rand has had a significant influence over American political life, having had a significant influence over such folks as Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and current Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. She was born in Russia in 1905, at the height of the rise of Soviet socialism. Having been driven from her family home in St. Petersburg by the Russian Revolution, Ms. Rand took up and harbored a lifelong disgust for collectivism and communism, and a deep engagement with free market capitalism, one which would ultimately lead her to be a significant figure in American conservatism. Her two most successful works are the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, both of which forward a philosophy she describes as objectivism.
What is objectivism? The best way to understand objectivism is to read Ayn Rand’s very own equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, the highest expression of her philosophy. which can be found in Atlas Shrugged. It’s a radio address spoken over hijacked airwaves through the voice of John Galt, the brilliant and elusive man of mystery who is mobilizing the flight of the best and the brightest from a world that only holds them back. Having used super-secret technology developed in the Galt-Cave to take over every radio in the world, Galt then proceeds to tell people why he’s doing what he’s doing.
It’s an interesting speech. First and foremost, it’s interesting because of how long it is. This sermon is about one thousand five hundred words, give or take a few words I either throw in or edit out on the fly. That comes to around fifteen minutes. Galt’s speech runs for precisely thirty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy one words. Meaning Galt talks, nonstop, for just about five hours. Even Bill Clinton doesn’t ramble on for that long. In the book, when Galt speaks, everyone sits and listens to the whole thing, which goes to show two things: 1) Ayn Rand may not quite have grasped the adult attention span, and 2) She didn’t have a solid sense of the capacity of the human bladder, either.
What’s more important, though, is what Galt is saying. Objectivism is a celebration of the power of the individual, of the right of the best and most noble souls to do as they wish. The heroes in Rand’s books tend to be rich and powerful industrialists. Those who are poor or materially unsuccessful are, in the eyes of objectivism, failures. As Rand describes them, they are parasites who only drain the life-energy of the great and the noble. Their job is not to get in the way.
Galt focuses the heart of of his impossibly long speech against the moral and ethical code that he views as having enslaved and destroyed humanity. That dark and oppressive morality is, as he puts it, "...to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare." For the entirety of this defining speech, Galt/Rand assails the "mystics" who would give themselves over to God, and those "moralists" who would give themselves over to neighbor. The enemy of human actualization is, for Rand, nothing less than the Great Commandment. You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Any ethic of self-sacrifice and selflessness stands in the way of the power of the powerful, and that, for Rand, makes it evil.
Now, being a classical liberal and all, I do have this tendency to want to be open-minded about things. It’s easy to see the appeal of Rand. The yearning to be a fierce and independent individual is a strong one. The desire to see yourself as among the noble few is natural.
But sounding her measure of goodness against the measure used by James creates an irreconcilable tension. James tells us that wealth and power can be spiritually dangerous, and warns against using them as a measure of human value. Jesus and Paul and the Torah and the Prophets say pretty much exactly the same thing. Rand tells us that the poor are weak, and that their suffering comes because they are unworthy, and that they may as well not even exist at all. Rand tells us that what matters is material success, period.
The choice between these two sets of values is stark and irreconcilable. It isn’t a choice between conservative and liberal. This isn’t a choice between individual liberty and collective responsibility. It’s deeper than that. James says that the one law that governs our freedom...the law of liberty...is the law of love. Rand says that no laws should govern freedom, period. It is also not trivial, because our values...if they are actually our values...define our actions. James taught that faith without works is dead. But in saying so, he was not devaluing faith. He was saying that for faith to be real, it must be real. It has to live, and breathe, and act.
And just as a living faith in Jesus of Nazareth manifests itself as compassion for all of God’s creatures, the cold hard “truth” that Rand teaches tends to have a very different appearance. It just plain ol’ looks different. Living according to that set of values concentrates power in the powerful, and wealth in the hands of the few. It expresses itself into the world as self-assured contempt, and as an entitled cruelty.
James says that the one law that governs our freedom...the law of liberty...is the law of love. Rand says that no laws should govern freedom, period, especially compassion. Both cannot be true. Both cannot be good. May we have the wisdom to choose the more excellent way. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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