Random Reflections On Putting Up With Progress

Political thought which begins from the premise that the primary purpose of government is to restrict freedom for the good of society has chosen to reduce adults to children, hence effectively equating the universal good with safety and comfort, and thus setting the stage for an inevitable rebellion in the name of liberty. Political thought which begins from the premise that the purpose of government is to liberate all humans for the good of society has chosen to set the population on an inexorable path towards a universal descent into an aimless and random childhood that will finally submit in desperation to the tyrannical control of anyone who promises safety and comfort. And so on and on.

“Lighten up.” Why? Why is lighter better? Better for whom? To what end? Is that end a genuine good, or merely a convenient evasion of something which ought not to be evaded?

As a teenager, I read several of Ayn Rand’s essay collections. Read and re-read them actually, while skipping classes, holed up in the high school library searching for everything that was not to be found in a public school classroom, which is to say everything enlightening or inspiring, everything that might serve as a reason to live. I never warmed to Rand’s fiction, and therefore never became one of those young acolytes with a Hank Reardon or John Galt quotation at the ready for every occasion. But her 1960s essay collections, rife with blunt, overly assertive quasi-certainties from nowhere, but also peppered throughout with memorable critical observations aimed at various deserving targets, became the cuttlefish upon which I sharpened my beak in those days before my soul was ready to fly confidently into the altitudes of genuine philosophy. Hence it is that, apart from a rare and isolated quotation check, I have not read her writing for decades. The mists of time have worked their magic of obscuring most of the details of Rand’s arguments from my mind, their place now occupied by that great history of ideas about which Rand herself wrote with such disdain and such ignorance. Nevertheless, a few of her pithier remarks, read and reread as an isolated teenager’s talisman against the spectres of fear and despair, have embedded themselves as permanent convenience store confections in my mind’s economy of existential truisms.

Here is one of those memorable remarks:

It is obvious that a boat which cannot stand rocking is doomed already and that it had better be rocked hard, if it is to regain its course.

That is to say, when stability has become so precarious that one’s actions are inhibited by fear of losing it, then it is time to admit that this is at best merely a quasi-stability, and that the dreaded collapse and disarray have effectively already arrived in spite of the barely-preserved appearance of calm, as is indicated by fear having become one’s dominant motivation. 

This puts us in mind of the conclusion of Nietzsche’s well-known aphorism, “Whispered into the ear the conservative.”

But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: more than this one cannot do.¹Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (R. J. Hollingdale translation), London: Penguin Books, 1968, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” §43.