The post title might make you think that I will be talking about a Tim Burton film, but alas, that is not the case. That man uses more shades of grey in his films than anyone else I know. Somebody who is a complete stranger to grey, is Ayn Rand.
If there is black and white, which stand for good and evil, and anything between is a shade of grey, then in regard to a specific issue, does Ayn Rand fall within the grey, even though she advocates only the presence of black and white? I was asked, "It seems to me then that either Determinism or Chaos Theory can exist (the black and white). Either everything happens by chance or is pre-determined. Ayn Rand believes in free choice but denounces chance. Do you find that Ayn Rand falls in the gray here?" First, we must define determinism and chaos theory.
Determinism is the belief that every event in life was influenced by past events. So, you turned left one day instead of right and this morning your burnt your toast. Pre-destination is the idea that some higher power has every aspect of our lives mapped out. Chaos theory is that nothing in life is predictable because everything falls on a non-linear graph. For the purposes of this blog, I am going to assume that by determinism, the person who asked the question meant pre-destination.
If the only factors we consider are pre-destination and chaos, then free choice would not even be on the chart. Free choice is not the blending of pre-destination and chaos, free choice is its own entity. Therefore, we must conclude that there are more than two beliefs of how life works. Free choice would mean that our lives are shaped by our choices, which we make by engaging our brains, accumulating data, and making informed decisions. So there are at least three different opinions. How would these three combine to give us a shade of grey?
A shade of grey would be the belief that 1/3 of life is pre-destined, 1/3 of life is chaos, and 1/3 of life is due to our own choices. However, that belief would never hold any water in any rational discussion, because we are merely trying to get the best of all three options. All three options cannot be correct, which means two of the options (assuming of course that there are a maximum number of three options) are wrong. Which one is right? For the purposes of this blog, the rightness or wrongness is not an issue, and bringing that into this assessment would only complicate things.
Ayn Rand's argument about black, white and grey, is that people who generally believe in the grey claim there is no black or white. She writes, in The Virtue of Selfishness, "If there is no black and white, there can be no gray - since gray is merely a mixture of the two." Which only goes to show that Ayn Rand believes there is a black and white. She says, "When a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other is evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture." Meaning, he has no justification for choosing grey. If you know one thing is right and the other is wrong, you have no rationalization for picking something in the middle.
But what about an issue where the good and evil may not be easily discernible? "If, in a complex moral issue, a man struggles to determine what is right, and fails or makes an honest error, he cannot be regarded as 'gray'; morally he is 'white.' Errors of knowledge are not breeches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience," writes Rand. This is not to say you won't be held accountable for your mistake, only that you are not violating your moral code if you do make a mistake, an honest mistake. She also says that if you are actively refusing knowledge in such a dilemma, that you would be violating your moral code, and would be evil.
Knowledge is good. Refusing knowledge is evil. We accept the fact that there is good and there is evil. Some people believe there is a mixture in the middle. There are people who fall in the middle. The difference comes into play in defining the middle. Most people would say the middle is grey. Ayn Rand says anything not good, is evil. If you're in the middle, you are not good, so you must be evil. To bring this back to the original question, of Ayn Rand embracing free choice but denouncing chance being a shade of grey does not make any logical sense, because life can't be chaos and free choice at the same time. Ayn Rand embraces what she believes and anything she doesn't believe is considered evil. Ayn Rand falls firmly within the construct of black and white because, based on her knowledge, she believes in free choice, not a variation of different alternatives.
© 2010 Nate Phillipps
No comments:
Post a Comment