Christmas and the failure of greed
Like a gift from the Magi it arrived, just in time to soothe a tortured soul searching for a theme for a Christmas essay. The headline on th
e press release read:
“Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial.”
The subhead, or secondary, headline, read:
“Christmas should celebrate reason, selfishness and capitalism.”
It was from Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute. Some years ago, the institute bailed us out on a Thanksgiving editorial with a similar missive, one touting Thanksgiving as a “uniquely American holiday” designed to commemorate material abundance.
Now here was Mr. Peikoff again, a self-described “objectivist philosopher” and heir to Ayn Rand’s intellectual legacy, such as it is, to bail out an editorialist on Christmas. For a man who celebrates selfishness, this was a generous gift, indeed.
A few choice nuggets from Mr. Peikoff’s latest holiday greeting:
- “Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as ‘materialistic’; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.”
- “Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: ‘Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?’”
- “Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate — and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.”
It should go without saying — but we will say it anyway — that despite its intellectual veneer, Mr. Peikoff’s view is so much reindeer poop. But let us extend the hand of mercy: This year, of all years, must be a tough one for the adherents of Ms. Rand.
For those who have mislaid their copies of “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-born novelist and screenwriter who devoted her life to what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Ms. Rand rejected religion. She rejected philanthropy. She rejected almost everything but laissez faire capitalism and what she called “rational selfishness.”
And although most of the world’s great religions celebrate charity as the greatest of virtues, Ms. Rand once said, “My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.”
Laissez-faire capitalism has had a very rough year. U.S. taxpayers are bailing out Wall Street, banks, automakers and other capitalists to the tune of at least $1 trillion, with more surely to come. Around the world, the story is much the same: Unrestrained greed turns out be a lousy philosophy on which to build a civilized economy.
The effects of its mistakes are cascading through the economy. Many Americans, whether out of necessity or fear, have said that they planned to cut back on Christmas and related holiday shopping this year.
Perhaps this is to the good, although retailers surely would not agree, much less the people at the Ayn Rand Institute. For years, a chorus of voices has decried the commercialism of Christmas. Now we finally have found a way to do avoid it: Pop the housing bubble, savage the credit markets and crank up the unemployment rate.
And yet, as the Grinch learned, Christmas came just the same:
And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons.
It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
We cannot pretend that there is a single “true meaning of Christmas,” only that one true meaning is not a “guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.” We can’t help but feel sorry for those who feel that way. As Dickens, who anticipated Ayn Rand, wrote, “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”
Christmas is how you keep it: a solemn religious holy day for some, a joyful day of family and remembrance for most, an important cultural touchstone for America and a celebration of shared traditions and values. For those who have no one but themselves and no value higher than themselves, it is often a disappointment.
Whatever it has become, Christmas began with a family drawn together for a purpose larger than themselves. Then and now, it was about hope and the promise of redemption. It is an annual invitation calling out what is best in all of us.
You don’t have to accept the invitation, but we hope you have done so. And to you and yours, Merry Christmas.
Maybe Peikoff is right. Our Democratic society embraces materialism through capitalism and claims it’s based on free enterprise which everyone knows isn’t democracy considering business organization is monocratic at best and a dictatorship in Ayn Rand’s characterization. It’s when people think business is democracy in action that we get in trouble…as demonstrated by the last eight years of Whitehouse vindication of corporate greed at its worst. As for Christian ethic, Corporate America is about the farthest thing from it by virtue of having very little virtue and the conscience of a boa constrictor in some cases.
I wonder if you even know the definition of ‘laissez-faire’ since you use the term to describe the American economic system. Government interference causes a problem. The problem is then blamed on ‘laissez-faire’, greed, anything to divert from the fundamental cause. This is followed by more government meddling, including giving away an ocean of money, either taxed or printed, which is given to those who know which strings to pull.
Also, “And although most of the world’s great religions celebrate charity as the greatest of virtues” is not an argument against Objectivism. My mother used to ask me if I would jump off a bridge if all my friends did. She didn’t call it the logical fallacy ‘argumentum ad populum’, but I learned the lesson. My Christmas wish is that you can learn it one day.
I notice the mention of selfishness these days as a negative from: candidate Obama, Pope Benedict XVI in his Christmas message, and the “we” of Kevin’s article. As everyone scrambles to discover what plagues our contemporary culture and has finally rotted it out from within, it is amazing to see how precisely Ayn Rand nailed it in Atlas Shrugged – that those people and ideals that make life possible would be first and last to be thrown under the bus (train) by those who demand altruism, selflessness, welfare-statism and safety-nets for all; while blaming the selfish for never bleeding quite enough.
I’m with Peikoff on this, enough with suffering as a virtue! Kevin, please feel free to stop feeling sorry for me. The darkness that has spread in the past (long before Ayn Rand) and may await is not rooted where you claim.
As I write this, I’m sitting in my basement waiting for my family –including two children home from college– to awaken so that we can open Christmas presents and then prepare dinner (at our house traditional Christmas dinner is a Mexican brunch). We have had lean Christmases in the past and may again in the future, but this year we spent liberally –mind you, a relative term– on each other and our extended family.
However, commercialism is not “the true meaning of Christmas.” The true meaning of Christmas is Christ. It is a time of celebration. Last night we attended a Christmas Eve service at a local church, followed by watching the film Narnia. If you need a postmodern narrative refresher course on who Christ was, I suggest you watch this film, which rolls Christmas and Easter together into a fantastic tapestry. Aslan (Christ) dies an innocent’s death to save the culpable Edmund and Narnia itself (where it is always winter but never Christmas) from the death grip of the White Witch. Winter’s iron-rule of Narnia (the Present Evil Age) is broken and summer (Christ’s Kingdom), breaks out all over.
So, now for the application. These seem like dark times, don’t they? 2008 may go down in history as the year so-called free market capitalism died in the US, and 2009 may become the year zombie-like socialism triumphs. Rising unemployment, declining housing prices, failure of government at all levels is frightening. Ann Rand, a capitalist and an atheist, didn’t have the answer. Bush, Inc. and Obama & Co., socialists all, didn’t/don’t/won’t have the answers either. The answer is Jesus Christ: “But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you (Mat. 6:33).
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Kevin Horrigan’s editorial malevolently attacks the well spring of human progress, capitalism. No coal this year for Kevin, as it is too good for him; let him attempt to enjoy the holiday without the benefits that capitalism makes available to honest traders. Unfortunately, Kevin is symptomatic of a financially failing industry that has attacked its source of sustenance.
One of the greatest of Ayn Rand’s achievements was to identify the true meaning of altruism. Altruism was not simply helping others, when you can, which most people would not object to. Altruism, she discovered, was the philosophical name for the idea that you must sacrifice a greater value to a lesser value. So, for example, if you have barely sufficient income to feed your own family, you may still be asked to sacrifice a portion of your money to give to those who are in a worse situation. Anyone refusing to do so is attacked as selfish and is is meant to feel bad about themselves.
Observing the effects of this idea on a society, she noted that in America it is the producers (businessmen, inventors, etc.) who are looked upon as morally inferior (because of their success in pursuing and holding on to wealth) and the ritual stealers (politicians and all those who advocate taking the wealth of others) who took on the mantle of moral superiority, because they advocated the ‘higher’ altruistic view that the producers must be sacrificed.
She was the first to ask ‘why’. Why must a person sacrifice himself to others? Why must a person be unselfish? What is really behind the attack on selfishness? She ultimately discovered that the path to happiness, to everyone’s happiness, is not guilt, sacrifice, and stealing - but pride, selfishness, and producing.
Most of the contributions on this page are very well thought out. Only one author found it necessary to make reference to goose excrement, to quote children’s stories to make his point, or to compare an author to Scrooge, the archetype of ill will. Very well done to most of you. To the remaining author, please consider reading the rules the rest of us are asked to follow when submitting content: Keep it civil.
Laissez-faire capitalism has never had a “rough year,” precisely because it has never had a year.
What we are experiencing in this economic collapse is the abject failure of 100 years of progressive public policy and government interference in the marketplace — or Interventionism; which predictably and inevitably goes awry. This has all been painstakingly explained by Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises before her.
On the contrary, this has been an excellent year for Rand Objectivists and the political concept of Capitalism, for they have both been vindicated. None of the problems the writer bemoans would have been possible in a political-economic social system that embodies individual rights, limited government and free markets — which is Capitalism.
I’ll thank the writer to be more thoughtful in future when analyzing the effects of economic crises and the causes to which they are attributable. Otherwise, he runs the risk of stepping into a steaming pile of his own making — as he most certainly has done today.
As stated so eloquently in an earlier blog by Tim Peck, we are not seeing the effects of laissez-faire capitalism. We haven’t had anything close to a free market economy since the end of the 1800’s. What we have now is a mixed economy at best. Partly free and a great deal of government intervention and regulation of businesses and the financial sector. It is precisely this intervention and regulation that has led to the current financial crises; not the greed of Wall Street, corporate executives, bankers or businessmen.
Mr. Horrigan’s unforgivable slur against Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s views indicates an intellect fallen to gutter-level. Given that, I suppose it’s unsurprising that his ignorance—or his evasions—is extensive.
Horrigan evades or is ignorant of history. The truth is a yearly celebration began “among many ancient cultures”—long before 200 AD—to celebrate the approach of spring and the re-generation of life. Around 400 AD Christians re-named it as a mass for Christ.
Horrigan evades or is ignorant of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Its ethics is fundamentally the advocacy of individualism and reason. Its primary focus is on a man’s right to live and to be the beneficiary of his own efforts. In the vernacular this is called rational selfishness. This is hardly a cause for alarm—unless you intend to rob others to support you.
Horrigan evades or is ignorant of economics. We do not have capitalism today, nor is capitalism the cause of the current economic mess. We have a “mixed economy”—i.e., many government regulations and some freedoms. It is government interference in the marketplace that caused the financial crisis, placing Americans in jeopardy. Blaming this on capitalism is a straw man set-up to provide a scapegoat concealing government’s violations of Americans’ rights.
Horrigan wrote “[Christmas]is an annual invitation calling out what is best in all of us.” But what is his standard of “the best?” Horrigon indicates the standard is non-life, which calls for self-sacrifice and living for others.
Miss Rand states that the standard of the good is man’s life. The best within us arises from our rational faculty and our commitment to reason. A genuine commitment to reason is a genuine commitment to life. To know the shortest day is past and that the cycle of life will be renewed once again is a certainly a cause for joy.
Horrigan says Christmas is to affirm the insignificance of man. He writes, “For those who have no one but themselves and no value higher than themselves, it is often a disappointment.” This is a snide way of saying the individual is of little or no value.
Miss Rand says there is nothing higher, nothing greater, nothing more important than rational man. Rational man is the fount of every good thing we have, of every good idea and product we enjoy.
Horrigon’s distortions of Christmas, of greed, of rational selfishness, of capitalism are old hat. So, one cannot say that he has reached a “new low.” However, he seems to be at home there. I detect considerable anxiety accompanying his dishonesty. I suppose that’s inevitable: Americans are beginning to understand altruists’ motives, and when enough do, Horrigan will be out of a job.