An Open Call for the Elections and Uri Avnery's "Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan"

In the coming two months we welcome submissions (to me at RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com) about what and who spiritual progressives should be backing in the coming elections. Tikkun & NSP are precluded from taking stands, but not from allowing readers to take stands. Most of your submissions on this will be put up on our websites–tikkun.org or spiritualprogressives.org. Of course what we seek are reasoned arguments, not diatribes, and arguments that show why you think the spiritual progressives’ worldview could best be served by a given candidate or party. But you don’t have to think “inside the box.” For example, there are some spiritual progressives who argue that the country would have been better off with McCain in 2008, because: McCain would have been under immense pressure from a Democratic Congress to do what a Democratic Congress did not do because Obama was one of their own: a. to end the war in Iraq more quickly than Obama did b. to resist funding any escalation of the war in Afghanistan c. to close Guantanamo and end all forms of torture (a position he actually shared with liberals) d. to oppose way more vigorously the Supreme Court’s overturning his own piece of legislation (McCain-Feingold) that set limits on money in politics . In addition, there would have been no Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party in the spirit of the worst racism and intellectual vacuity we have yet seen in politics. I am not endorsing any of these arguments, but using them to show that when you think about the coming election and write about it in Tikkun, you do not have to be “realistic” in your thinking, just rational.
Below I’m sharing an article sent to us by Uri Avnery on Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand. Like every such article, we do not claim this to be an official Tikkun perspective, but rather an interesting take, in this case from the leader of the most intellectually coherent Israeli peace movement–Gush Shalom.
P.S. If you have any Jewish friends, ask them if they have any Jewish friends in the Bay Area, and if so, would they please tell their friends about Beyt Tikkun Synagogue Without Walls and our High Holy Day services dedicated this year to social justice issues–and led not only by me, but by Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman, two of the most famous and outstanding Jewish thinkers about spirituality and social justice. Plus Rae Abileah, a young woman who has been one of the national leaders of Code Pink who stood up to challenge Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke at the U.S. Congress (she was pounced on and dragged out by right-wing Jews surrounding her). The details of our service and how to register for them is at http://www.beyttikkun.org/article.php/HHDMain

The Fountainhead: Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan
by Uri Avnery
August 25, 2012
I WAS not interested in Paul Ryan, the man about to be nominated by the
Republican party for the office of Vice President, until the name Ayn
Rand popped up.
Ayn Rand, it was said, was one of the main inspirations for his
particular philosophy. Since Ryan is being represented not as an
ordinary, run-of-the-mill politician, like Mitt Romney, but as a
profound political and economic thinker, the inspiration deserves some
scrutiny.
LIKE MOST people in this country, Ayn Rand first entered my life as the
author of The Fountainhead, a novel that came out four years before the
birth of the State of Israel. It quickly became a bestseller. The movie
based on it, with Gary Cooper playing the main role, was even more popular.
It is the story of an architect of genius (roughly similar to Frank
Lloyd Wright) who follows his own individual style and disdains the
tastes of the masses. When his architectural design for a housing
project is altered by the builders, he blows the buildings up, defending
his actions in court in a stirring speech in defense of individualism.
(Honest disclosure: I have often dreamed of doing the same to certain
buildings in Tel Aviv, especially the luxury hotels built between my
home and the sea.)
I started to read her second bestseller, Atlas Shrugged, in which she
set out her philosophy in detail. But I must confess, to my eternal
shame, that I never finished it. It bored me.
ONE DAY IN 1974, my friend Dan Ben-Amotz called me and demanded that I
immediately meet a young genius he had discovered called Dr. Moshe Kroy.
Ben-Amotz was a character by himself. A man of my age, he was at the
time Israel’s most conspicuous humorist and an icon of the generation
that fought in the 1948 war and created the new Hebrew culture.
Ben-Amotz, like many of us, was not only a self-made man, but also
self-invented. He was known as the ultimate Sabra (native-born Israeli).
Much later it transpired that he was actually born in Poland, arrived in
Palestine as a boy and adopted the very Hebrew-sounding name to replace
his original name – Moshe Tehilimzeigger (“reciter of psalms” in Yiddish).
He brought Kroy to my home and I was impressed. Here was an unusually
erudite 24-year-old youngster, already a lecturer at Tel Aviv
University, with thick glasses and very outspoken philosophical views.
It appeared that he was a True Believer in the teachings of Ayn Rand,
which she called Objectivism. This proclaimed that egoism was the basic
duty of every human being. Any kind of social commitment was a sin
against nature. Only by serving his own interest and cleansing himself
of any trace of altruism can a person truly fulfill himself. Society at
large can progress only when it is based on such individuals, each one
striving to serve only himself (or herself).
Such an outlook can be hugely attractive to a certain kind of
individual. It provides them with a philosophical justification for the
extreme exercise of egoism, not giving a damn for anyone else.
Kroy, and of course Ben-Amotz, were religiously devoted to this new
creed. (This is, of course, an oxymoron, since Ayn Rand was a total
unbeliever, condemning any form of religion, including the Jewish
religion of her parents.) When I caught Ben-Amotz doing something which
could be construed as beneficial to others, he went to great lengths in
justifying it by proving that in the long run it was to his own ultimate
advantage.
Kroy himself was obviously a very disturbed being. At the age of 41, he
committed suicide. I was not certain whether Ayn Rand disturbed his mind
or whether he was attracted to her because he was disturbed to start with.
AYN RAND was born as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg,
which later became Petrograd, which later became Leningrad. She was 12
years old when the Bolshevik revolution broke out in that city. The
pharmacy of her parents was taken over by the regime, and the bourgeois
family fled to the Crimea, which was held by White Russian forces. Later
they returned to their native city, where Alisa studied philosophy and
even published a book in Russian. In 1926 she reached the US, leaving
her parents behind.
She adopted the name of Ayn (rhymes with “swine”, as she herself was
wont to explain). She probably took the word from the Hebrew, where it
means “eye”. The surname Rand may be a contraction of her original
German-Jewish family name.
Her early history may in some measure explain her abiding hatred for
Communism and any kind of collectivism, including social democracy, as
well as any kind of religion or statism. For her, the state was the
enemy of the free individual. This led her naturally to embrace an
unbridled laissez faire capitalism (what Shimon Peres called “swinish
capitalism”) and to reject any form of welfare state or safety net.
All this was well structured in her philosophy, which was adopted by
believers all over the world. She once called herself “the most creative
thinker alive”. On another occasion, she asserted that in all the annals
of philosophy, there were only three great thinkers, all starting with
an A: Aristotle, Aquinas and Ayn Rand.
She must have been an unabashed racist, too: during the 1973 Yom Kippur
War she said that it was “civilized men fighting savages”, comparing
Israelis to the White Americans fighting the Red Indians.
No wonder that she posthumously became the darling of the Tea Party
fanatics who are now dominating the Republican Party. And no wonder that
Paul Ryan proudly cites her as one of his most important mentors. (Ayn
Rand herself died in 1982 at age 77. Her funeral was attended by her
devotees, including Alan Greenspan, one of the gravediggers of the US
economy.)
There is something in the teachings of this Jewish White Russian
preacher of extreme egoism that appeals to the primitive American myths
of rugged individualism, gun-toting Wild West self-reliance, suspicion
of the domination-hungry state (going back to King George the Third).
But this is not the 18th century, for God’s sake.
I NEVER studied philosophy, though on my path I have picked up a few
dozen books about it here and there. But Ayn Rand’s theories always
struck me as, well, juvenile.
There is a picture in my mind. The late Israeli writer Pinchas Sadeh
described how once, as an adolescent, he had climbed a ladder in the
library of his kibbutz, taken out a book of Nietzsche’s and stood there,
at the top of the ladder, for several hours, unable to stop reading. It
was, I suppose, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a dangerous book for young
people. It also had a huge impact on Ayn Rand in her younger years.
Nietzsche castigates the “Jewish pity morality”, which has infected the
adorable “blond beasts”. Compassion for the weak is a sin, because it
blunts the capabilities of the strong, those on the way to becoming
supermen. Which young person does not see themself as a potential
superman (or, I suppose, superwoman)?
When Dan Ben-Amotz tried to convince me of the “rational egoism” of Ayn
Rand, I countered with a simple argument: when I was wounded in 1948 and
lay completed exposed to enemy fire, four soldiers of my squad came up
and rescued me, risking their lives. Their egoism must have told them
that this was an extremely silly thing to do. Risking their most
precious possession – their very lives – for another human being was
inexcusable according to Ayn Rand. They had nothing to gain from it.
They had everything to lose.
I have seen in my life innumerable acts of altruism, large and small.
Indeed, what is love, real love, but a pure form of altruism?
Sure, every person is, to some extent, an egoist. But every person is
also, to some extent, an altruist. Human beings are social animals,
their social instincts deeply imbedded in their nature. Without them,
human society could not function.
I TOO was captured by Nietzsche in my youth. But “Jewish pity morality”
won. That’s why I, like many Israelis, cannot even begin to understand
American social attitudes, as illustrated yet again in the present
election campaign.
For us it is self-evident that the state has a duty to help the sick,
the old, the children, the handicapped and the disadvantaged. An ancient
saying goes “Israel (meaning all the Jews) are responsible for each
other”. Long before the State of Israel was born, we already had a
strong system of health insurance and social services. Social insurance,
instituted in Germany by the right-wing politician Otto von Bismarck in
Nietzsche’s time, is for us Israelis self-evident.
Binyamin Netanyahu is an American-style Republican, a strong supporter
of Mitt Romney. He has done incalculable damage to the Israeli social
net, both as Finance Minister and as Prime Minister. But not even he
would advertise himself as a disciple of Ayn Rand. He has, however, one
thing in common with Paul Ryan: both are pushed forward and financed by
Sheldon Adelson.
I can think of no purer personification of Ayn Rand’s vision than this
Casino billionaire. She would have adored him. He is the perfect egoist.
He has become super-rich by exploiting the pitiful addiction of weak
human beings. His business practices have been questioned. Yet even here
there is some room for doubt: does Adelson spend hundreds of millions on
people like Romney, Ryan and Netanyahu only to further his own business
interests? Or do we detect even here a trace of altruism, a desire to
fulfill his national and social visions, objectionable as they may be?
SINCE AYN RAND was an atheist and abhorred anything that was not purely
rational, while the Tea Party is strictly religious (never mind what
religion), Ryan is now compelled to distance himself from his mentoress,
who was also a militant advocate of abortion.
Actually, I don’t believe in either the intellectual prowess or the
political honesty of the man. He looks to me slightly phoney. I am not
sure that Ayn Rand would have liked him either. If only Gary Cooper
could play him, he might look more convincing.