• About
  • Contact
  • Staff
  • Home
  • Essays
  • Forum
  • Podcasts
  • Book Reviews
  • Liberty Classics

September 15, 2012|Ayn Rand, David Sloan Wilson, Paul Ryan

David Sloan Wilson on Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan

by Mike Rappaport|

David Sloan Wilson is an interesting biologist.  He is most known as a strong advocate of group selection and favors employing evolution to understand human behavior.

Wilson has a piece up where he seeks to explore the reasons why Paul Ryan, who he terms a religious fundamentalist, was attracted to Ayn Rand’s atheistic approach.  While Wilson argues that religious fundamentalism and Randianism seem to be radically different views, they have more in common than at first appears.

Wilson argues that both views do not recognize tradeoffs.  They see their recommendations as good for everyone.  Wilson writes:

Rand created a system of thought that is just like religious fundamentalism in portraying a world without tradeoffs. This begins to explain her enduring appeal. She offers a world that has been simplified to the point where the only choice is to head toward glory (the pursuit of self-interest) and away from ruin.

Wilson supports this through the following method.

I was exploring how people use words such as “selfish” and “altruistic”, which refer to the effects of actions on self and others. . . . Every time I encountered the use of a word referring to the effect of an act on self and others, I placed it in one of the four quadrants.

What were the four quadrants?

In the real world, our actions can result in any of the four outcomes. There are win-win situations where everyone gains, lose-lose situations where everyone suffers, win-lose situations where I gain at the expense of others, and lose-win situations where I must sacrifice to benefit others. In a realistic description of the world, words referring to our actions would therefore be placed in all four quadrants. When I started to analyze some fundamentalist religious texts, however, a different picture emerged. All the words ended up in either the top right (win-win) or bottom left (lose-lose) quadrants.  [Similarly], in Rand’s world, the pursuit of self-interest was invariably good for everyone and the traditional virtues were disastrous for all.

As someone who has followed religious fundamentalism and Rand, this is quite interesting.  Rand always had a religious flavor to her works – something I think she even recognized.  One might view this aspect of Rand as her imagining a different world and her having had an extremely idealistic approach to life.  But Wilson’s is another take.

We can see the power of Wilson’s approach by considering other secular beliefs that are often referred to as “religious.”  Both Marxism and environmentalism, in certain versions at least, have a religious flavor, and part of the story is what Wilson suggests: both minimize tradeoffs and suggest that things will be good for everyone if their recommendations are taken.  Wilson sees himself (I think) as a man of the left and therefore seems to think that downplaying tradeoffs is solely a defect of right-wing thinkers, but of course it is not.

Wilson’s concludes his post:

The problem with visions of life that are detached from the world—no matter how intoxicating—is that they crash and burn when they encounter the real world. The real world includes win-lose and lose-win situations that must be managed, and pretending that they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.

The fact that [Paul Ryan is drawn to both Randianism and] religious fundamentalism might seem like a contradiction, until we realize that both portray worlds without tradeoffs in which the only choice is to head toward glory and away from ruin. How simple. How compelling. How easy to communicate to others. And how disastrous for solving the problems of modern human existence.

This is powerful, if one loses the ideological aspects of the post.  But let us not forget that sometimes a view of this type is correct.  Sometimes policies are actually harmful for everyone.  Sometimes – to put it in practical terms – we are leaving (society’s) money on the table.  Sometimes tax rates really are at the unfavorable part of the Laffer curve.

And in those cases, you do really do want to get your message out in an effective way and your message is compelling.  That helps to explain the power of these type of approaches.

Of course, the key question is knowing when we are in the unfavorable part of the Laffer curve for any type of tradeoff, and when we are not.

Mike Rappaport

Professor Rappaport is Darling Foundation Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism. Professor Rappaport is the author of numerous law review articles in journals such as the Yale Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Georgetown Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. His book, Originalism and the Good Constitution, which is coauthored with John McGinnis, was published by the Harvard University Press in 2013.  Professor Rappaport is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he received a JD and a DCL (Law and Political Theory).

About the Author

Friday Roundup, September 14th
As Parents Write Tuition Checks to Behemoth State

Recent Popular Posts

  • Popular
  • Today Week Month All
  • The Gresham's Law of Law February 13, 2018
  • Crisis of the Calhoun United March 20, 2013
  • Jury Nullification: Good or Bad? January 16, 2018
  • Lessons of the French Revolution February 20, 2020
  • Frederick Douglass's "Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston" August 21, 2019
Ajax spinner

Related Posts

Related

Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

Read More

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O’Connor’s correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Read More

Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

Read More

James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

Read More

Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

Read More

Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

Read More

Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

Read More

America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

Read More

Recent Posts

  • The Just Restraint of the Vicious

    For some contemporary criminal justice reformers, devotion to ideology leads to illogical conclusions about human nature and character change.
    by Gerard T. Mundy

  • Too Immature to be Punished?

    When I look back on my own life, I think I knew by the age of ten that one should not strangle old ladies in their beds.
    by Theodore Dalrymple

  • A Badge of Discrimination

    The British National Health Service has spoken: Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.
    by Theodore Dalrymple

  • A Judicial Takeover of Asylum Policy?

    Thuraissigiam threatens to make both the law and the facts in every petition for asylum—and there are thousands of them—a matter for the courts.
    by Thomas Ascik

  • The Environmental Uncertainty Principle

    By engaging in such flagrant projection, the Times has highlighted once again the problem with groupthink in the climate discussion.
    by Paul Schwennesen

Blogroll

  • Acton PowerBlog
  • Cafe Hayek
  • Cato@Liberty
  • Claremont
  • Congress Shall Make No Law
  • EconLog
  • Fed Soc Blog
  • First Things
  • Hoover
  • ISI First Principles Journal
  • Legal Theory Blog
  • Marginal Revolution
  • Pacific Legal Liberty Blog
  • Point of Law
  • Power Line
  • Professor Bainbridge
  • Ricochet
  • Right Reason
  • Spengler
  • The American
  • The Beacon Blog
  • The Foundry
  • The Originalism Blog
  • The Public Discourse
  • University Bookman
  • Via Meadia
  • Volokh

Archives

  • All Posts & Publications
  • Book Reviews
  • Liberty Forum
  • Liberty Law Blog
  • Liberty Law Talk

About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
  • Home
  • About
  • Staff
  • Contact
  • Archive

© 2021 Liberty Fund, Inc.

This site uses local and third-party cookies to analyze traffic. If you want to know more, click here.
By closing this banner or clicking any link in this page, you agree with this practice.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Necessary Always Enabled

Subscribe
Get Law and Liberty's latest content delivered to you daily
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Close