As a fan of Ayn Rand who occasionally likes to defend her
against the charges that her villains—the figures in culture,
business, and government who in her novels embody what she
considers hateful ideas—are absurd caricatures with no connection
to lived reality, I invite you to
read today’s David Brooks column. I know it’s a hard thing to
ask, but do it for Ms. Rand, I implore you.
Brooks, one of the most prominent columnists in the newspaper
that supposedly defines our media culture, the New York
Times, riffs like a
Linus with a guillotine on the “true meaning of Passover.”
Outdoing Ayn Rand’s villainous Fountainhead columnist
Ellsworth Toohey in his mission to redefine the human spirit as
one best expressed in servitude.
It’s not even that he’s doing the usual “we need big government”
argument of pointing out all the actual miseries and troubles it
supposedly is uniquely able to solve. Brooks is arguing on a deeper
level: we need big government because we need authority to tell
us what to do; it is positively good for us on a metaphysical
level, never mind its practical effects.
Like Loki, clearly the guy who Brooks mistook for the hero in
the Avengers movie, Brooks tells us we were born to be
ruled.
Excerpts:
Monday night was the start of Passover, the period when Jews
celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from slavery into
freedom.
Sure, escaping from slavery to freedom is cool—I
guess!—but isn’t there another side to this story,
Isralites?
But that’s not all the Exodus story is, or not even mainly
what it is. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the
United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as
a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one
set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set
of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with
just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part….
Brooks then gives lip service to the notion that, sure,
the story of Moses also shows that leaders need to be bound by
rules as well, being sometimes imperfect and impetuous. (The even
larger meaning one can glean from the whole “contract with God”
story is that God himself needs to be, or wants to be, bound by
rules and agreements freely entered into.)
But back to Brooks’ more vital point: you need someone to tell
you what to do, at all times!
Just as leaders need binding, so do regular people. The
Israelites in Exodus whine; they groan; they rebel for petty
reasons. When they are lost in a moral wilderness, they immediately
construct an idol to worship and give meaning to their lives.But Exodus is a reminder that statecraft is soulcraft, that good
laws can nurture better people. Even Jews have different takes on
how exactly one must observe the 613 commandments, but the general
vision is that the laws serve many practical and spiritual
purposes. For example, they provide a comforting structure for
daily life. If you are nervous about the transitions in your life,
the moments when you go through a door post, literally or
metaphorically, the laws will give you something to do in those
moments and ease you on your way.
Oh, for a world—one being built more solidly by bureaucracy
every day—in which you can’t even walk through a door without a set
of rules to control you, er, “ease you on your way.”
And if you choose not to be thusly eased, someone with a gun
will come by to ask you why. Maybe in the middle of the night and
bashing in your door. After shouting a warning, of course. We are a
nation of laws!
The laws tame the ego and create habits of deference by
reminding you of your subordination to something permanent….The
laws moderate the pleasures; they create guardrails that are meant
to restrain people from going off to emotional or sensual
extremes.The 20th-century philosopher Eliyahu Dessler wrote, “the
ultimate aim of all our service is to graduate from freedom to
compulsion.”
Bam! Let us not forget the wisdom of America’s great
Judeo-Christian tradition: freedom is for the unformed, compulsion
is for the Real Adults, the kind of real adults who tell us what to
think from their perch at the world’s mightiest newspaper.
Last month Jesse Walker noted Brooks’s upset tummy over
our lack of respect and obeisance to Great Leaders.
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