ARI’s Intellectual Incubator invests in early-career intellectuals committed to relentless growth and to impacting their fields. We catalyze their growth through training, mentorship, and work opportunities. One example: We hire Incubator members to develop and teach micro courses in their areas of expertise. Such courses are an opportunity to strengthen their ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and precision.

The first micro course concluded earlier this month. David Bakker, a graduate student in mathematics and philosophy of science, taught Joseph Fourier’s The Analytical Theory of Heat, using the French mathematician’s work as a case study in the process of scientific discovery.

Over the course of five weeks, Bakker guided students through Fourier’s intellectual journey: how his experimental observations led to the formulation of mathematical laws, how those laws were developed into the heat equation, and how the solution provides genuine physical insight.

Students engaged directly with both the technical and conceptual dimensions of mathematical physics, working through the material inductively. Rather than beginning with finished equations, they started from Fourier’s own observations and gradually reconstructed his reasoning, allowing them to grasp how the theory emerges from the concretes.

In May and June, the Incubator will offer two new micro courses on the intellectual history of the United States, a timely topic on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. The courses are open to current and former ARI students.

In Political Philosophy of the Founding, Dr. Tristen Fleig, who also attends law school, will guide students through key documents and debates of early American history. Conventional university courses cover the figures and timeline of the Founding, Dr. Fleig says, but they rarely “help students grasp what animated these figures or events. I’ve designed my course so that students can get that experience of just what ideas and principles inspired these men to embark on the radical mission to create a wholly unique nation.”

The Republic of Producers: Natural Rights and the Rise of Capitalism in America, taught by Mohamed Ali, a graduate student in philosophy, will offer a complementary perspective on the philosophical currents that defined America’s creation. “My course follows natural rights theory from Locke through Paine and Jefferson and uncovers the specific legal and social changes it produced in the first half-century of the American republic,” says Mr. Ali. “For anyone who has wondered how philosophy produces real consequences in the world,” says Mr. Ali, “the early American republic offers the clearest possible answer.”

“Core to the design of the Incubator is the recognition that doing intellectual work — writing, editing, teaching, lecturing — is essential to catalyzing growth,” says Elan Journo, a senior vice president at ARI, overseeing the Incubator. “Crucially, micro courses are not simulations or classroom exercises. We hired David, Tristen, and Mohamed as instructors, and we expect them to produce new knowledge and effectively impart it to students. I believe micro courses hold great promise, and I’m eager to see more Incubator members teach them in future.”

Learn more about these courses and sign up here.

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Texas A&M University recently adopted a policy restricting the topics professors can discuss. In a recent discussion, my colleague Ben Bayer made a point that resonated with me: this policy rests on an implicit view of the human mind that is worth challenging.

A&M’s policy bans professors from teaching “gender ideology” and even just raising the topics of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” That last part is notable: no discussion of these topics is permitted, even if it includes multiple viewpoints and encourages students to think for themselves.

The implicit view is that exposure to certain ideas, by itself, has a corrupting effect. Hearing the views of “gender ideology” expressed or even described is thought to act on students’ impressionable minds, turning them into adherents to this ideology. The only safe policy is to shield them from such notions entirely.

But I for one don’t experience ideas as imprinting themselves on my mind against my will, turning me into a mindless adherent. I was exposed to many “woke” claims as a college student, but I was able to think about the arguments and evidence presented in their favor and decide whether or not to accept them.

Upon assessing the evidence and arguments, I did accept a few, such as the point that women and non-white people still face subtle forms of discrimination that others sometimes do not notice. But I did not encounter any compelling reasons for the notion that grouping people into identity-based collectives and treating the historically oppressed groups more favorably is a solution. So I did not accept this idea.

True, some people do choose to unthinkingly absorb ideas from others, including “gender ideology.” The idea that all knowledge works this way is probably familiar to religious conservatives. Their worldview preaches blind faith rather than rational understanding as the way to know religious truths. But religious conservatives should not assume everyone parrots the viewpoints of whatever seeming authorities they happen to have encountered.

The only way a university can help dogmatic students who unthinkingly accept ideas from others is by urging them to think for themselves. Sheltering all students from controversial or false ideas to allegedly “protect” those with this mindset only inhibits the intellectual development of the students who are most thoughtful.

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Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, defines “state capitalism” as “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”¹ Ip argues that the U.S. is becoming more similar to China by adopting “state capitalism with American characteristics.” Commentators at prominent organizations like The Washington Post, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Cato Institute have made similar statements.2^,3^,4^,5

There’s reason to worry that the United States is heading toward a system like China’s where the government exerts more control over businesses. But the term “state capitalism” obscures the real nature of this disturbing trend and muddies our understanding of capitalism. There’s a different concept — one completely antithetical to capitalism — that accurately captures the current trend, and it’s one that opponents of that trend desperately need to understand more deeply.

The Marxist origin of “state capitalism”

One reason to be suspicious of the term “state capitalism” is its origin. The term doesn’t come from advocates of free markets, but from Marxist theoreticians.

According to Marx, genuine socialism arises only when the state “withers away” after the revolution of the working class. His collaborator Friedrich Engels claimed that a system in which the state seizes private businesses from their owners and runs them itself is still a form of capitalism, and the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht introduced the term “state capitalism” to name the situation Engels described.6^,7

Subsequently, some Marxists have used the term to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. The brutal Soviet dictatorship, they argued, cannot be blamed on socialism, because it is not real socialism — it’s “state capitalism.”8

This origin gives opponents of Marxism (like Ip and Cato) every reason to ask whether it carries false Marxist assumptions that distort discussions of political systems.

It does. The term “state capitalism” presupposes the Marxist view that the defining feature of capitalism is that a “class” of people owns the “means of production” and employs others to perform labor (who are thereby, they say, “exploited”). Marxists consequently don’t claim to recognize a fundamental difference between private industry and industries owned and operated by the state. To Marxists, any society in which one “class” of people owns the means of production is some type of capitalism. Under the “real socialism” they imagine, “classes” will disappear along with the state.

The Marxist view, in essence, is that the state becomes a capitalist by owning and operating a business. But this wrongly conflates private businesses with government-owned businesses. By applying “state capitalism” to China and to Trump’s policy of acquiring ownership shares in businesses, Ip and others are buying into a blatantly Marxist distortion.

Private vs. state-owned businesses

There are fundamental differences between private ownership and state control that must not be ignored. A private business operating in a free economy can only deal with people by voluntary agreement. Its employees, suppliers, customers and investors are free to decide whether to deal with it or not. And it can only stay in existence by figuring out how to make profits — which it can only do by producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Not so with state-owned businesses like China’s three largest mobile carriers, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. These three companies almost completely dominate the market because the Chinese government prohibits any new company from entering the field unless it is at least 51% government-owned. This means that anyone who wants to do business in the telecommunications market is forced to deal with one of these three firms.

And although Chinese state-owned enterprises have some nominal autonomy in their operation, they must seek approval on all major decisions from a committee of members of the Chinese Communist Party organized within the enterprise.9 And the central government body that oversees many of the country’s state-owned enterprises can force them directly to make changes to their operations. For example, all three of these companies were engaged both in operating cellular networks and in constructing cell towers. In 2014, however, the Chinese government forced these companies to give up their tower construction businesses. It took over their assets related to tower construction and created a new state-owned business, China Tower Company.10

These state-owned businesses operate in a fundamentally different way from Verizon and AT&T. The owners of private companies are free to decide which industries to enter, what goods and services to produce. They succeed by creating value and offering trades that people willingly agree to. But a government forcibly controls the decisions of executives of state-owned businesses companies. And it runs a business like China Mobile by wielding force to limit competition. Describing this authoritarian control as a kind of “capitalism” obscures the fundamental difference between voluntary trade and coercion.

Marxists, of course, want to obscure that difference, because they want to destroy the system of free enterprise. The coinage “state capitalism” doesn’t just permit them to whitewash Marxism by distancing it from the Soviet nightmare; it also enables them to smear private entrepreneurs by equating their operations with government coercion. Advocates of economic freedom should not walk into their trap.

The right concept for America’s ominous direction

Think about what it means more broadly to say that both China and a country with completely free, private enterprise are “capitalist” societies simply because someone or other “owns” its businesses.

China, a country with state ownership of businesses, is a brutal dictatorship that heavily restricts speech, surveils its citizens and arrests them for long periods of time without any due process.11 A country with free markets in which businesses are privately owned could also completely and consistently protect individual rights, including not just property rights but also freedom of expression, personal liberty and due process. On all the most important political issues, such a country would be the opposite of China. Equating them under the label “capitalism” would be absurd. It would serve only to whitewash China and/or smear free countries.

I would argue, following Ayn Rand, that capitalism is best understood as a system “based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”12 This definition highlights the stark difference between a country of private enterprise and a country in which the economy is largely controlled by the state, and reserves the term “capitalism” only for the former.

On this conception of capitalism, it doesn’t make sense to think the United States was a fully capitalist country even pre-Trump. The U.S. certainly has much more private ownership and economic freedom than China, and it does a far better job protecting citizens’ rights more generally. But the regulatory state has long infringed in major ways on Americans’ economic freedom. By the 21st century, the American economy was already only partly capitalist, mixed with heavy elements of statism. It would be most apt to describe it as a mixed economy moving further and further away from capitalism.

What is it moving toward? If not “state capitalism,” is there a name for the specific type of statism toward which the U.S. is moving under Trump? Another statement from Rand is illuminating here. In contrast to socialism, which abolishes private property in favor of state ownership of industry, there is a variant of statism in which individuals “retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”13

The name for that system is fascism.

Although people today mainly associate fascism with racism and nationalism, Rand’s point is that there is also a characteristically fascist type of control over the economy.14 In spite of still calling themselves “communist,” the Chinese government exercises this same type of fascist control over many of its officially private businesses. And Trump’s use of tariffs and regulation to control American businesses are an ominous step in America’s journey toward the same destination.

Those of us who oppose the shift of the U.S. political system in the direction of China should name it clearly for what it is. We are not in a transition from one type of capitalism to another, “state capitalism,” but a transition away from capitalism and toward a fascist form of statism. If we are to have a chance at reversing this transition, we must clearly identify it as a fascistic trend, not equate it with its opposite.

Ayn Rand offers an answer in her essay “The Age of Envy.” Originally anthologized in her book The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and now available online for the first time, she argues that hostility to values more generally is nothing less than the defining spirit of our time.

What is this spirit? Rand calls it “hatred of the good for being the good.” It is a drive not to attain the good but to punish and destroy it. Once this motive is named, it can be seen everywhere in the culture, from classrooms to boardrooms.

As one illustration, Rand draws a striking contrast between early conceptions of socialism and modern egalitarianism. However evil and destructive in practice, socialism at least pretended to aim at raising the standard of living for all. By contrast, today’s egalitarians show little interest in achievement or production, seeking instead to level all distinctions, rejoicing in the downfall of the successful. Rand goes on to show how other modern ideologies, such as multiculturalism and environmentalism, are manifestations of the same underlying psychology.

What is the underlying psychology? Rand traces it to a troubled relationship with self-esteem, in which the sight of achievement is experienced not as an inspiration but as something to resent or evade.

A culture driven by hostility to the good demands explanation. Read “The Age of Envy” to see how she accounts for it.

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life — an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Continue reading the essay here, or find it in Rand’s book Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Today, April 6, 2026, as the world watched the journey of Artemis II disappear around the far side of the moon — in America’s first manned mission to lunar space in over 50 years — Astronaut Victor Glover quoted scripture. He spoke of the mystery of love and quoted Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love God with all that you are.”

This was not the first stunt bringing religious faith into space. During the very first Apollo manned mission to orbit the moon on December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Book of Genesis. Ayn Rand, who was enthusiastic about the human achievement that the space program represented, published scathing criticisms of the incident in her periodical, The Objectivist. Here is an excerpt from these comments:

When, from the distance of the moon, from the height of the triumph of science, we expected to hear the astronauts’ message and heard, instead, a voice reciting the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen as a text — reciting the Bible’s cosmology — I, for one, felt as if the capsule had disintegrated and we were left in the primordial darkness of empty space.

If you wonder what perpetuates the reign of irrationality on earth, you have seen a demonstration: it is not done by the worst among men, but by the best—not by the masses of the ignorant, but by the leaders who default on the responsibility of thought — not by witch doctors, but by scientists.

No witch doctor’s power to encourage mankind’s darkest superstitions is comparable to the power of an astronaut broadcasting from the moon.

There are two questions that should be asked: Would the astronauts treat the slightest malfunction of the least significant instrument aboard their spacecraft as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treated the most important issues of philosophy? And, if not, doesn’t man’s spirit deserve the same disciplined, conscientious, rational attention that they gave to inanimate matter?

The flight of Apollo 8 was a condensed dramatization of mankind’s tragedy: a demonstration of man’s epistemological double standard in the fields of science and of the humanities.

Why this reaction? In her later essay on the occasion of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand made clear why the Apollo missions represented a triumph of human rationality:

One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding!

She says “for once” because in the tradition inherited from religion, “human” has come to mean “imperfect,” “corrupted,” “sinful.” As a champion of the absolutism of reason, Rand saw religious faith as the historical enemy of all forms of human achievement. So it should come as no surprise that she saw the Bible reading as a throwback to the primitive ideas that had long undercut and persecuted the scientific achievement that made the space program possible.

Rand’s full comments are available in the November 1968 edition of The Objectivist (issues were frequently backdated), which can now be purchased in paperback. Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter.

Students interested in learning more about Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism can learn more by ordering free books like Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. They’ll see why, even though she was fascinated by space exploration, Rand advocated first and foremost “a philosophy for living on Earth.”

It is a philosophy that holds reason as an absolute, and holds that faith is an “only a short-circuit destroying the mind.” It was not “love” of some alleged God that brought man to the moon, but the rational love of truth.

This winter, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and I co-taught an ARI course titled “Reactionary Authoritarianism: From Mussolini to the ‘New Right.’” Working through the historical readings and lectures with Nikos gave me a richer understanding of the ancestors of today’s anti-freedom factions — and the dynamics that enable them. Three brief reflections:

1. What fueled fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism lives on.

To understand the rise of these movements in the 20th century, it’s crucial to view them as part of a wider trend, not only or primarily as responses to such upheavals as World War I and the Great Depression. The wider trend, Nikos argued, is a rejection of the best features of the Enlightenment: its emphasis on reason, individualism, and freedom. That anti-Enlightenment impulse lives on. You can see it infusing the self-described “post-liberals,” the “new right,” the National Conservatives, and other MAGA-adjacent factions today, which repudiate “individualism” and “capitalism” in favor of the nation or tribe.

2. The deliberate attacks on “individualism.”

It’s well known how fascists and Nazis vilified “individualism,” but a theme throughout the course is how thoroughly that ideal was misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted by its detractors. Deliberately so. The individual, left free to think and act on his own, was seen as corrosive of group bonds. But in reviling the individual, they offer a false picture: a self-absorbed seeker of momentary, decadent pleasures, unconcerned with moral norms and traditions. Such people exist, but as Ayn Rand argued, it’s false to view them as (genuine) individualists. Consider how she projects the ideal of individualism in the character of Howard Roark, whose animating principle is his independent rational judgment, and who is vested deeply in building a lifelong productive career; Roark rejects moral norms and traditions when he judges them to be irrational.

The distortion relies on what Rand called a “package deal”: the fallacious bundling together of things that are essentially different. Part of how this works: they lump the rational individualist together with the self-absorbed pleasure seeker, because of superficial, non-essential commonality, since they appear self-interested and stand apart from the collective. Echoes of this are evident today in the writings of Patrick Deneen (Regime Change; Why Liberalism Failed) and Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism), whose work we’ve written about in New Ideal and analyzed on the podcast. There’s urgent work to be done clearing away the package-deal conception of individualism and educating people about the actual nature of this ideal.

3. The power of moral sanction.

Well before Britain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938, the German political establishment had already enabled his entry into the mainstream. A similar pattern was involved in Mussolini’s rise in Italy. Broadly, the ideologists of racism, tribalism, authoritarianism, and kindred factions are often grasping for precisely this: a moral sanction from reputable, establishment figures. They want the semblance of belonging in respectable, civilized society. This is an enduring dynamic that people grossly under-recognize.

Flash forward to a recent example, but on a far smaller scale. When Tucker Carlson hosted the racist, antisemitic, misogynistic influencer Nick Fuentes for a long, friendly conversation, it was moral laundering. Fuentes was getting the same thing he enjoyed after his 2022 dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Seeing this pattern — then and now — deepened my appreciation for Rand’s insight that evil is impotent and parasitic on the good. Put another way, there is enormous power in withholding the “sanction of the victim.”

One personal highlight of this eight-week course was working with Nikos Sotirakopoulos. He led the course, selected the readings, and lectured each week; I consulted on the outline and chimed in during class. Nikos is a dedicated, energizing teacher and a historian committed to getting at the facts of the matter.

Coming up this spring and summer are several new ARI courses, including on Rand’s individualist ethics, the corporation, and globalization — frequent targets of today’s dominant political tribes.

Nationalism is clawing its way back. At a rally last October, Donald Trump galvanized the audience by declaring himself a proud nationalist. Europe, too, is witnessing the growing influence of political parties advocating nationalism. Even as nationalism has entered the political mainstream, it remains intellectually disreputable.

But Yoram Hazony, a political scholar, wants to redeem nationalism and rehabilitate its reputation. His book The Virtue of Nationalism is bound to resonate with a swath of intellectuals and voters, here and in Europe, who thrill when Trump and other politicians hammer on nationalist themes. Hazony presents a conception of nationalism with soft edges, one that is supposedly compatible with some measure of liberty. And therein lies part of the book’s danger. It is calm, erudite, and theory-heavy. The book attempts to provide a serious, intellectual case for embracing nationalism.

When I first heard about the book, in an email exchange with Hazony about a year ago, I looked forward to reading it — not because I expected him to convince me, but because I always learn a lot from engaging with people I disagree with. Did I find the book convincing? No. But to engage with its argument is to see (or, see more acutely) why there’s a fundamental chasm between nationalism and a free society. Hazony’s case for nationalism is a philosophic repudiation of individual freedom.

The book’s argument is intricate, and here, rather than review the book as a whole, I want to draw out some of its crucial premises, because they are so telling.

The argument: From family to tribe to nation

Central to Hazony’s argument is the question: What kind of political order is best? For centuries, he contends, we in the West have faced two alternatives, “empires” (or “imperial” orders), enforcing universal political ideas — or independent national states. Imperial regimes, Hazony argues, are predicated on the conviction of having attained the ultimate political truth — and bringing it to all, by force if necessary. For Hazony, any embrace of universal political ideas leads to imperialist aims, animosity against those who resist those aims, and conflict.

By contrast, Hazony argues, it is only the “national state” that can lead to a stable political order. This is because it is built on the only foundation for social order: the mutual loyalties of family, and by extension a tribe. Such bonds extend from family and tribe to nation: the “national state” consists of an agglomeration of tribes who share a common language and history, and see themselves as a community. Accordingly, Hazony insists that we must reject “empire,” or “imperial” orders, mainly because these negate the particular character and needs of the nation.

The “order of national states” is best, Hazony writes, because it “offers the greatest possibility for collective self-determination.” [Emphasis added.] Thus there would be “many such national states, each pursuing its own unique purposes and developing its own vision of human life.”

The concept of nationalism that Hazony argues for in the book is allegedly distinctive. First, Hazony distances his view from racial theories of nationalism, arguing that one can be adopted into tribes, not only born into them. Second, and even more remarkable, the “national state” that Hazony envisions is uninterested in war-making, conquest or domination. The true nationalist, he writes, “knows that there is great truth and beauty in his own national traditions and in his own loyalty to them; and yet he also knows that they are not the sum of human knowledge, for there is also truth and beauty to be found elsewhere, which his own nation does not possess.”

Nationalism, for Hazony, is peaceful because of its parochial orientation, whereas “empire” fuels conflict because of its claim to universal truth. What to make of this argument?

Unpacking Hazony’s argument

Hazony offers his narrow, unambitious conception of nationalism as the basis for a peaceful, stable political world order, but in fact it unavoidably sets the stage for conflict. His argument depends on an underlying philosophic view that pushes aside the crucial faculty — reason — that makes peaceful coexistence possible.

One inheritance from the Age of Enlightenment is the recognition in political thought of the individual as a rational being. It is reason that enables people to reach objective truth, grounded in observable fact, which everyone can come to recognize. That’s what enables us to communicate ideas and resolve disagreements through persuasion, rather than physical force. The principle of individual rights — itself a universal truth — is a recognition that each of us is a rational being and must be left free to set our own path in life according to our own best judgment. Politically, this principle endorses only persuasion as the means of resolving disputes and it bars the initiation of force from human life.

But Hazony repudiates this Enlightenment view of individuals as sovereign and capable of using reason to attain truths about the world. Instead, he writes, “no human being, and no group of human beings, possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to dictate the political constitution that is appropriate for all mankind.” For him, it’s a mistake to think of the principle of individual rights as a universal political truth. It is rather a “cultural inheritance of certain tribes and nations.”

Hazony argues that a national state fosters the creation of a particular kind of moral character in its members, and he repeatedly stresses his belief that individuals have an intense need to serve the well-being of the collective. (One wonders: Is this a universal political truth?) But the picture we get of group-centric society is peculiarly devoid of specific, real-world detail.

What really happens in societies where reason and individual rights are dropped out of the picture, where each tribe/nation is left to do its own thing? At least two things are clear: First, such societies are highly tribal. People define themselves primarily, if not exclusively, by their tribal or racial identity, while viewing outsiders as less-than-human, because they were born to the “wrong” tribe/race. Second, and crucially, the door is left wide open for disagreements and enmities to be resolved through brutality, not persuasion, because outsiders are seen as innately inferior, wrong, unreachable. For example, consider the tribal wars that have decimated Africa. A notorious example is Rwanda’s tribal war in 1994, which claimed upwards of 800,000 lives. Or look at the repeated eruption of tribal/nationalist wars in the Balkans. There, during the early 1990s, we witnessed the return of “ethnic cleansing” and concentration camps. These are manifestations of tribal/national groups jockeying for collective self-determination.

Occasionally Hazony will mention in abstract terms that actual tribal societies, which are notorious for conflict and bloodshed, do have a dark side, but we get little else.

Hazony seems to view Israel as aligning with his distinctive conception of nationalism as parochial, unambitious, peaceful. But it is actually a counterpoint to his argument. In my book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, I analyze Israel’s character as a nation. Israel is a blend of nationalist/tribal elements (defining itself as a “Jewish” state) and individualist elements, reflected in its robust protections of individual rights and freedom. And because of those pro-freedom elements, Israel is non-imperialistic, unlike its more tribalistic neighbors (Syria, for example, dominated Lebanon for decades; Iran today holds sway over Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria). Israel’s remarkable virtues stem from the degree to which it lives up to the ideal of individual freedom. But many of its shortcomings, including some of its moral failings, derive from the country’s religious-tribal aspects, particularly the encroachment of religion into politics.

The individualist aspects of Israel’s political system are not only at odds with its tribal/nationalist character. They are borrowed from outside. What’s good about Israel stems from the degree to which it has adopted and implemented the universal political truths in the post-Enlightenment approach that recognizes people as rational, sovereign individuals. These ideas are truths that anyone, regardless of race, tribe or ancestry, regardless of where they live, can and should recognize and embrace.

Universal truth leads to conflict?

And yet Hazony contends that any claim to universal truth is dangerous. It is at the heart of what he calls “empire” (or “imperial” orders), and it’s a wellspring for conflict. For Hazony, the Soviet regime is an exemplar of “imperialism,” because it claimed to have the ultimate political truth and proceeded to impose it as a universal idea through brutal conquest. Hazony writes that one can have “no better destroyer than an individual ablaze with the love of a universal truth.”

If we take this claim seriously, we’d have to regard someone like Thomas Jefferson as some kind of “destroyer.” Clearly he was “ablaze” with a love of several universal truths. For example, in the Declaration of Independence, he writes that human beings are created equal, and that they are morally entitled to live in freedom, rather than under tyranny. Even recognizing Jefferson’s personal failure to live up to his own conviction (he abhorred slavery but retained his slaves), it’s absurd, and grossly unjust, to put him in the same category as Lenin and Stalin, brutal tyrants responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.

It’s not only Jefferson who refutes Hazony’s claim; you could count as well Martin Luther King Jr., who famously gave voice to the universal ideal that individuals should be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. We can find many more counterexamples of thinkers and activists who, in the name of universal truths, pushed civilization forward.

The evil of the Soviet regime was not its claim to hold a monopoly on universal political truth. It’s that Marxism-Leninism is a false ideology, one that clashes with the facts of reality and human nature. It’s an ideology deeply rooted in group-centric premises, which we also find in Hazony’s argument.

Nationalism as a type of collectivism

For Hazony, as we’ve seen, the starting point and yardstick in political thought is not the individual, but the family, the tribe, the nation. This group-centric approach views the individual as subordinate. What matters is the collective’s self-determination, the development of its own vision of human life. Hazony’s approach therefore is a form of “collectivism,” which the philosopher Leonard Peikoff defines this way:

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective — society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. — is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it — or its representative, the state — deems this desirable.¹

Collectivism was not just one, or even a prominent factor, but the defining feature of the Soviet Union. The proletariat came first, and individuals mattered only insofar, and for as long, as they served the needs of the collective. “You cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”: That’s a justification often attributed to Stalin. The “eggs” were human lives, and not a few — but millions, smashed in the name of serving the needs of the proletarian collective.

Or take another example, one invariably associated with “nationalism”: Nazi Germany. Hazony, a Jew and committed Zionist, is at pains to dissociate his conception of “nationalism” from the Nazis.

The National Socialist party, he acknowledges, clearly had “national” in its name. But a true nationalist, in Hazony’s conception, values peaceful coexistence. So Hazony contends that because Hitler wanted to replace the international order of independent national states with German dominance, he was not in fact a nationalist. Hazony classifies the Nazis as “imperialists,” because they sought to take their political vision global. Such classification obfuscates rather than clarifies. Why wouldn’t a nationalist, eager to subordinate and sacrifice individuals within his own nation to the collective, not be eager to do the same to outsiders?

Obviously, it’s true that the Nazis sought to dominate and conquer, but it’s impossible to look at their doctrines and policies without recognizing that Nazism blended racism and nationalism — two forms of collectivism. Listen to their leader:

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole . . . that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. . . .

This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. . . . The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call — to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness — idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifice for the community, for his fellow men.2

The point to take from this comparison of the Soviet and Nazi regimes is that collectivism was integral to what made them so destructive and aggressive. And it is this same premise that underpins “nationalism,” despite Hazony’s attempt to formulate a redefined, unambitious conception of it. To unpack Hazony’s argument is to see that his conception of nationalism is fundamentally opposed to the ideal of freedom.

The thrust of Hazony’s learned book is to urge us to turn away from a legacy of the Enlightenment: the focus on the value of the individual as a sovereign, rational being. Let us instead bury “nationalism” and dedicate ourselves to better understanding what’s required to defend a free society.

Among Isaacman’s goals for NASA is to “partner with industry . . . to figure out how to extract more value from space than we put in — and critically attempt to solve the orbital economy.” NASA would accomplish this by, for example, a “bulk buy” of guaranteed contracts to support commercial space stations.¹ The euphemism of “partnership” obscures the reality of public-private “partnerships:” an industry that “partners” with government is one that is subsidized, therefore, controlled by the coercive power of the state.2

What Isaacman fails to understand is that his proposed means — “partner with industry” — is in contradiction to his stated end: “extract more value from space than we put in.” His premise — widely shared by those in a position to shape space policy3 — is that commercialization either requires or will be accelerated by government subsidies and direction. The truth is the opposite: to the extent that NASA or other government agencies assert control over the space industry, they are an impediment to the commercialization of space.

The Regressive Effects of “Partnering” with Government

NASA has always prioritized human space flight. But, despite a thriving private space industry, human space flight has not become commercially viable. Insofar as NASA has encouraged private companies to spend their talents on human space flight, it has retarded commercial progress.

To see why this is so, take a step back to the early 2000s when the current private-sector space race kicked off. At the time, the widespread presumption was that space would become profitable through tourism. The original “Billionaire Space Race” was not just between Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) but also included Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic. Branson’s company was founded to provide suborbital flights to space tourists. Its twenty-two-year history has been marked by failures and setbacks, culminating in a 2023 bankruptcy. (It is still in operation though it paused attempts at commercial flights in 2024).

Virgin Galactic received some support from NASA, but that support was insignificant in comparison to what its competitors received. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX received significant support from NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. For example, COTS provided funding for SpaceX to further develop its partially reusable Falcon 9 orbital rocket. (This funding came at a time when Musk would have had to further risk his own wealth or raise more private investment to keep SpaceX afloat.) The COTS contract also funded the development of SpaceX’s human spacecraft Dragon, which was conceived for the sole purpose of earning the contract. Without NASA’s initial support and continuing support as a customer, Dragon would not exist.4

However, despite public enthusiasm and NASA support for manned spaceflight, after twenty years Blue Origin can send popstars to space and wealthy philanthropists like Isaacman can conduct manned science experiments, but no one can turn a profit from human space flight. The failure of Virgin Galactic, and the inability of Blue Origin and SpaceX to profitably monetize manned spaceflight, is definitive evidence that human spaceflight was not and is not currently an “extract more value than we put in” venture.

In contrast, by the mid-2020s unmanned spaceflight has become incredibly profitable, just not in a way anyone outside of SpaceX dared to pursue: the first profitable use of low-cost space launch is selling internet subscriptions.

In the early days of the company, Elon Musk and SpaceX thought deeply about how to make cheap access to space profitable and began building the Starlink program, which is now earning them $15 billion-per-year in revenue and growing.5 At present, SpaceX is really a telecommunications company, vertically integrated to provide its own launch services! Falcon 9 made it possible for them to deploy Starlink, a constellation of approximately 10,000 satellites. Starlink does not require government subsidies to turn SpaceX a profit. This fact has signaled to SpaceX that the best use of its profits is to re-invest into launch technology and the expansion of orbital computer infrastructure.

Now, it is true that COTS funding contributed to the development of Falcon 9, the workhorse of the Starlink constellation. But to obtain the COTS contract, SpaceX had to build Falcon 9 so that it would be safe enough to transport human beings. As exciting as human space flight is, to the extent that Falcon 9’s design was altered to enable human cargo, it was not optimized to transport Starlink satellites.6 Furthermore, every dollar spent on Dragon and every engineer devoting time to human spaceflight was one not available to Starlink.

In other words, COTS incentivized SpaceX to devote resources to human space flight in addition to their efforts toward space-based internet. A more systematic and heavily funded COTS program would have invigorated their early competitors, pulling talent away from what became proven, value-increasing uses of space. Had NASA meddled in the market then to the degree that Isaacman now envisions, the evidence that human spaceflight is not yet valuable and that space-based computer infrastructure is, could have been drowned out by the illusion of “successful” space tourism.

Diverting resources from Starlink to human spaceflight delayed the deployment of the constellation, thereby delaying its profitability, thereby delaying the signals its success sent to the industry, and therefore delaying the commercialization of the space industry.

From the perspective of profitable, self-sustaining technological progress in space, SpaceX’s accomplishments in human spaceflight were missteps, made possible only by NASA’s intervention in the industry.

As I argued in “Freedom to Launch,” space is only valuable if it is profitable in a market in which all participate freely — including investors and customers. Since NASA is funded through the coercive tax system, a space industry predominantly dependent on government contracts is not profitable in the commercial sense of being independently self-sustaining.

Isaacman rightfully wants the industry to “extract more value from space than we put in.” But this does not simply mean that a company’s ledger shows numbers written in black larger than those written in red. The mark of a self-sustaining industry is that its revenues come from voluntary customers. When its profits are earned, rather than expropriated, a company proves its services valuable to investors and customers. Such proof is by its nature unavailable to an involuntarily funded industry. This is what it means to commercialize space.

How could a former tech entrepreneur like Isaacman fail to see the difference between an industry made profitable through voluntary exchange and his envisioned industry dominated by the coercive powers of the state?

Defense Tech’s Misleading Example

Isaacman’s embrace of the private sector is part of the broader trend among technology-forward government institutions. The leader here is the Department of Defense, which abandoned the model of purchasing weapons from a few privileged suppliers to one of fostering a defense tech startup culture. The result has been a flourishing of defense startups; companies like Anduril and Palantir are now household names, and their work is keeping American military technology far ahead of our adversaries’.7

In support of his view of NASA’s role in the space economy, Isaacman cites the military development and then commercial adoption of jet aircrafts as a model.8 Isaacman’s NASA would develop and subsidize technologies not yet commercially viable, such as nuclear electric propulsion, until the commercial sector can take over.

Isaacman is taking the wrong lesson from the defense industry’s pro-market reforms. His model confuses the features of a thriving, private defense industry with those of a thriving commercial industry.

The defense industry is essentially different from commercial industries. It is necessary to America’s security, but its size and profitability are not the result of “extracting more value . . . than we put in.”

Imagine a world in which far fewer countries were potentially hostile to America. Do we think that, in such a world, the defense industry would need to be as large as it is today? The size of the defense industry is not a function of how much productive value it creates but of how great is the threat from hostile countries. Ideally, the size of the industry would be small because the threats we face would be minimal.

In contrast are the many, non-defense industries that have the U.S. government as a customer. The government needs laptops. But the existence of Apple and Dell do not depend on selling to Uncle Sam.

By taking the success of the private defense industry as inspiration and model, Isaacman is continuing the space community’s decades-long conflation between the defensive functions of government and of private, voluntary commercial activity. That longstanding confusion left the industry unfree until the early part of the 20th century. Now its administrator’s plan to increase NASA’s control over the orbital economy threatens to hobble the newly freed industry’s nascent attempts to become commercial.

In the abstract, it is obvious that cheap, easy access to space is valuable. Space holds unlimited resources, unlimited real estate, and countless potential scientific discoveries. Who wouldn’t want to see Earth rise during a lunar vacation? But it is far from obvious in the concrete how those values can be profitably realized, given the current state of the industry’s technological and business knowledge. To bring the harder to capture values within our grasp, entrepreneurs must first discover easier, high-value uses of space technology.

One company’s commercial success sends a signal to the whole industry. We are seeing this in real-time as the industry learns from SpaceX’s lucrative Starlink products. Early missions for Blue Origin’s New Glenn are expected to launch satellites for Amazon’s Leo, a competitor to Starlink. Blue has recently announced plans for its own satellite constellation, TerraWave, another space-based high-speed internet service.9

The success of Starlink is also a signal as to what new products might be profitable. It’s increasingly looking like the best use of Earth’s orbital space, right now in 2026, is not space stations or tourism, but computer infrastructure. Unlimited space and direct sunlight make space a great place to put energy-hungry data centers, powered by massive solar arrays. At least, that’s what SpaceX thinks.10 Alphabet is exploring space-based computing infrastructure through Google Research’s Project Suncatcher, a proposal for solar-powered satellite constellations equipped with TPUs to scale machine-learning compute in space.11 Blue Origin has announced its intention to pursue space-based data centers.12 The market signals are clear.

Isaacman’s plan to promote commercial space stations would be a long-term subsidy of an unproven path to profitability. If a commercial station would fail without government contracts to “solve” its business model, it is not a profitable use of space technology. The effect would be the direction of taxpayer wealth and engineering talent toward ventures Isaacman favors and away from proven paths to value.

Of course, if entrepreneurs can (voluntarily) raise money from investors to experiment with the commercial viability of space stations, they should do so. The technology developed for orbital compute will undoubtably contribute to the viability of human space travel. But for the future of the space economy, it is essential that these experiments are the result of the free judgment of all parties, including their funders. This is how industry will discover what human presence in space iscommercially viable.

Government’s Role in the Space Economy

There is a respect in which Isaacman is right, though not in the way he intends. There is a “problem” with the space economy that only government can solve. As I argue in “Space Pioneers Need a New Homestead Plan,” until very recently, America’s policy with respect to space property has been dismal. The commercialization of space is only possible if the property rights to resources and real estate are clearly defined and forcefully protected.

The enforcement of individual rights, including property rights, is the only legitimate function of government. To achieve this end, the U.S. government must act domestically to pass laws recognizing property rights in space (easily reversed executive orders are inadequate).13 Internationally, America must use its position as the dominant space power to negotiate treaties that secure the property rights of American space investments (non-binding agreements are inadequate).14 Finally, it must acquire or develop the technology to enforce those rights, should the time come when its physical presence in space is required (this includes, but is not limited to, military functions).

Only when the U.S. government commits itself to enforcing property rights and abandons its efforts to force industry will we be able to capture the full potential of space travel.

The recent film by Agnieszka Holland, Mr. Jones, portrays the Soviet Russians’ attempt in the 1930s — with the assistance of sympathetic Western journalists like Walter Duranty — to cover up the famine caused by collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. The film is a heart-wrenching and damning account of the Soviet experiment — and of the dishonesty that enabled it.

And yet, 87 years after Gareth Jones showed the world the crimes of socialism, there are still Western enablers who engage in a different kind of coverup of the same facts. As a result, a growing number of young people consider themselves socialists, and socialist politicians have risen in prominence. One was almost nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States.

It is only thirty years since socialist regimes collapsed economically around the globe, leaving in their wake a death toll of tens of millions. We have seen the same pattern repeated in Venezuela in only the last twenty years. How do today’s defenders of socialism try to cover up this history and justify the ideology that supported such murderous regimes?

One tactic that today’s socialists employ is to portray the lessons of history and world affairs as irrelevant to their cause. They claim that the Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Cuba, and today’s regime in Venezuela are not real examples of socialism at all. Real socialism, you may have heard them say, has never been tried.

What makes people think this is true? What do they mean by “socialism” and is their view even plausible?

What is “socialism”?

Socialism, in a standard definition, means public ownership of the means of production, which implies the abolishing of private property and ending the capitalist system of free trade and free markets. This is often understood to mean state ownership of the means of production.

By that standard, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other authoritarian regimes all count as “socialist”: in every case, insurgents seized control of governments which then expropriated private farms, factories and shops from their capitalist owners — many of whom lost not only their property, but their lives. What’s more, these insurgents were led by figures (Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc.) that were explicitly committed to socialist ideology.

The economic failure, famine, and bloodshed suffered by each of these countries flowed directly from the same policies advocated by today’s socialists. Just as socialists demand, businesses were torn from the hands of their creators, those who both knew how to produce and who had a personal financial stake in improving their ability to produce. These businesses were then managed by bureaucrats who lacked both of these qualifications, and who also lacked the tool of the free market pricing system to calculate how much of which goods to produce. Production decisions were determined not with an eye to creating value above cost, but to the demands of arbitrary edicts from central planners. It is no accident that this system created shortages and starvation, and that regimes had to crush the resulting dissent to retain power.

Socialists try to insulate the system they advocate from this evidence of failure by using a talking point that (as we shall see) they have used since the beginning of their movement. They put a spin on the “public ownership of the means of production” definition. Real socialism, they say, doesn’t mean state control of the economy; it means control by “the people,” especially by the workers.

For instance, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto, claims that real socialism means “democratic” control of the workplace by worker collectives. He claims that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a socialist society because it did not involve democratic control.¹ Likewise, Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs and author of Why You Should Be a Socialist, claims that, for similar reasons, none of the authoritarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century were socialist, and claims to “hate government and capitalism alike.”2 Richard Wolff, who has been described as “America’s most prominent Marxist economist,” agrees.3 He argues that the Soviet Union was really an example of “state capitalism”: while the nominally socialist party controlled the state, the state was “still capitalist in the employer-employee organization of its economy” because “a minority of persons . . . [the central planners] functioned as employers of an employee majority.”4

Using their definition of “socialism,” these thinkers would have us believe that since state control of the economy is not control by “the people,” no full-scale socialist political system has ever existed in history. If true, this would allow them to excuse their ideology from any responsibility for the murder and oppression of the brutal, allegedly “socialist” systems of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. It also allows them to pose as the torchbearers of a noble ideal that has simply been corrupted by political operators of the past.

Is there any plausibility to the claim that “socialism” doesn’t really mean state control of the economy, but something else? Are today’s socialists really envisioning a wholly new system than what the revolutionaries of the past actually implemented? Or are they simply playing games with the word “socialism” to avoid the obvious facts?

Fantasy speculation about the role of the state

Not everyone proposing a novelty is indulging in fantasy. A newly envisioned invention, like an airplane, can be based on known facts about birds, kites, and gliders. But even then, experiments are needed to prove the efficacy of the idea. And if the proposal is, say, a perpetual motion machine, which has no experimental basis and goes against the laws of physics, the proposal is selling a fantasy.

Although the proposal that “real” socialism doesn’t require the use of state power might sound new or innovative to the uninitiated, a few questions and a little knowledge of history are sufficient to show it is just as much a fantasy as a perpetual motion machine.

First, note that the socialists paper over the coercion and even violence that would obviously need to happen to expropriate private property from peaceful citizens to set up their system in the first place. (The mask drops when they start advocating “lawbreaking and sabotage” as worthy tactics in revolutionary social change.5) By itself this calls into question any assertion that socialism can be implemented without bloodshed: socialist ends cannot be detached from socialist means.

But even if we could imagine that private property holders were simply persuaded to give up their holdings peacefully, the notion that the ideal socialist system would work without coercion or oppression is hard to imagine, if it is even coherently meaningful to begin with. Consider Richard Wolff’s explanation for how a system of worker co-ops would gradually wean itself from the need for a state:

An economy based on worker co-ops would revolutionize the relationship between the state and the people. In their capacity as a self-employed collectivity, workers would occupy the spot traditionally held by the workplace in state-workplace relations and interactions. . . . The workers would collectively and democratically hold the purse strings to which the state would have to appeal. The state would thus depend on citizens and workers rather than the other way around. . . . The state would have fewer ways and means to impose its own momentum and goals upon citizens or workplaces. To that extent, the state’s “withering away” would become more immediately achievable than in any other variety of socialism known thus far.6

As I’ve argued elsewhere at greater length, the allegation that “democratic control” ensures freedom from coercion and oppression is an old fallacy that turns on an equivocation between a government with elected representatives and a society run by majority rule. The latter is what socialists advocate when they claim that factories should be run by workers, regardless of what the factory’s original creators have to say about it. This constitutes a direct violation of the rights of a minority of individuals. So if workers really do end up holding “the purse strings” of the factories and the power to make the state appeal to them, it makes little sense to say that the state would “wither away” as an entity independent of the workers.7 Rather, the workers would in effect be running a state.8

When Wolff is pressed to provide a real-world example of the system he envisions, he and other socialists often point to the Mondragon Corporation, a Spanish worker-owned manufacturer of a variety of industrial and consumer goods.9 But Mondragon is an international corporation that sells its products to private firms all over the globe, and employs an increasing number of foreign workers who are not members of the collective. At the same time, its workers increasingly depend on pensions from the Spanish state.10 Invoking the Mondragon example evades the question of whether a company like Mondragon could survive in the absence of a more general capitalist system that buys its products and provides market prices by which to calculate resource allocation, and the system of state-sanctioned private property rights that makes this possible.11 It also evades the question of whether a company run “democratically” (unlike most corporations) could exist in the absence of a coercive state that taxes capitalists to fund worker pensions.

The idea that real socialism involves social control of the economy without the state is not new, but you need to be aware of some history to realize this. It goes back at least as far as 1877, when Frederick Engels claimed in Anti-Dühring that after the proletariat seizes control of the state and thereby the means of production, the state would “wither away” or “die out.”12 Evading the important role of a state in protecting peaceful coexistence among individuals by protecting their rights, Marx and Engels held that the only role of a state is to enforce the exploitation of one class by another. Working from this fantastic premise, they deduced without evidence that once the state comes to represent the proletariat, class distinctions would disappear and, with them, the need for the state.13 Lenin toed the same line in a lengthier work of no greater depth, but since he was himself a political operative who needed to rationalize his revolutionary actions, he argued that state control of the means of production was necessary as a transitional measure on the way to the achievement of real socialism.14 The same argument was then invoked for years by Stalin as he continued to starve and murder people in the name of eventually achieving the ideal of real socialism.15

All of this means that Lenin and Stalin and the other founders of the brutal Marxist regimes justified their actions using the exact same fantasy as today’s socialists do. They promised that the system they advocated would eventually eliminate state oppression as well. We saw what it actually delivered.

Why should we believe socialists today who also claim that their proposals to nationalize industries will take us further from and not closer to the specter of the Soviet catastrophe? They offer no better evidence than hucksters who sell perpetual motion machines. In fact what they’re doing is much worse, both because they actively evade the evidence, and because what they sell isn’t just dysfunctional — it’s deadly.

The real meaning of socialism

Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. But to understand what this means in practical reality — and why it cannot mean what the socialists propose — we must appreciate what “public ownership” actually refers to.

There is no magical entity called “the public.” A society is composed of individual human beings. In reality, the only mechanism by which the actions of an entire society can be coordinated is by means of a government. And so the only way for anything resembling “the public” to systematically deprive capitalists of private property and to abolish capitalist free trade is for the state to do it. Every socialist acknowledges this, whether they advocate violent revolution to establish a collectivist state or a majority vote to establish the same.

“Socialism” can only mean state ownership of the means of production. There is simply no evidence that there is a way of implementing or maintaining a universal system of worker co-ops without state enforcement. (Without a state, there is no way of maintaining any kind of social system. Anarchy is incompatible with even the semblance of a peaceful social coexistence.) This means that the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and the other catastrophic regimes of the twentieth century are the real meaning of the concept of “socialism” — as is the democratically elected but now dictatorial Chavista regime in today’s Venezuela. Socialists cannot escape this reality through wordplay or fantastic speculation.

It is no surprise that socialism evades facts about the nature of the political system it works to achieve. The whole idea that animates the drive for socialism, the idea that human life would be improved by eliminating capitalism, is itself founded on similar evasions of basic facts.

I believe that those who are willing to study the facts carefully will realize that the entire edifice of socialist thought evades everything we know about human social and economic life. It evades that the root of production is the individual human mind, not the labor of brute muscle or blind “economic forces.” It evades that capitalists add value to workers’ labors by conceiving of new goods and services and coordinating the capital, labor, and marketing necessary to produce them. It evades that individuals have free will and can accept the opportunities capitalists offer, or not (whether the invitation to work with them, or to consume their products). And, as a consequence, it evades that the violent expropriation of private property and vestment of it in the state cannot create a peaceful and prosperous society.

Evading all of these facts, the Soviet Union openly declared its intention to centrally plan the lives of its citizens. Western intellectuals of the 1930s who knew these basic facts really had no excuse for apologizing for the Soviet experiment — regardless of the poor reporting coming out of Russia. But this means that today’s socialist intellectuals are doing something especially inexcusable. They know all of the journalistic facts about the horrors of the 1930s that intellectuals then did not. But still they defend the same policies that led to these horrors. Their sophistry asks us to discard these facts as irrelevant. It should not take a Gareth Jones to expose their cover up. It should only take a commitment to intellectual honesty.

Expressions of fear over climate change are reaching apocalyptic proportions:

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” claims Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Our house is on fire,” says 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, telling world leaders at Davos:

We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. . . . I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. . . . I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.

But these apocalyptic warnings are fueled by a massive lack of perspective.

For one thing, despite the constant claim that disasters caused by man-made climate change are already happening, the end-of-the-world scenarios we’re presented with are not primarily derived from real-world data but from computer models that are demonstrably unreliable. According to climate scientist Judith Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, “the climate models making dire predictions of warming in the 21st century are the same models that predicted too much warming in the early 21st century, and can’t explain the warming from 1910–1945 or the mid-century grand hiatus.”¹

And these scenarios ignore the bigger picture of mankind’s relationship to the climate. I’ve argued previously in favor of taking a broader look at what makes us vulnerable to climate-related risks. Doing so suggests an alternative perspective: That the changes that might occur in the climate system itself pose far less of a risk to us than do the destructive consequences of the political policies offered as “solutions” — policies such as severe restrictions on carbon-fueled industrial development and regulations that impede resilience and adaptability.2

Even if one accepts the need to plan for an increased risk of climate-related disasters, the proponents of end-of-the-world scenarios show no recognition of the life-or-death importance of abundant energy, the physical and economic realities of energy production, or the devastating consequences of the sweeping carbon-cutting policies they propose.

As a corrective to the near-panic that pervades our cultural atmosphere, what’s desperately needed is a broader perspective on the climate issue.

Fortunately, such a perspective can be found in a recent book exploring the connections between the current fears over climate change and previous environmental concerns — in particular, fears related to population growth.

The book is Population Bombed!: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change by Pierre Desrochers, associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, and Joanna Szurmak, a graduate student at York University.

Published in October 2018 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation — a UK-based think tank that offers sober and scientifically rigorous perspectives on issues related to climate and energy — Population Bombed! argues that the apocalyptic warnings we’re seeing today over climate change are nothing new.

Far from being an unprecedented and uniquely intractable crisis, the climate change issue is essentially similar to previous anticipated environmental crises — crises that failed to materialize, for reasons we’ll explore below.

By offering a broad, historical perspective on these unrealized environmental fears, Population Bombed! provides a welcome corrective to the climate of panic over climate.

The fizzled population bomb

The title, Population Bombed!, is a nod to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, a classic work in the environmentalist canon that offered forecasts as alarming in its day as today’s climate warnings are in ours.

Based on 1960s projections of world population growth in relation to global food production, Ehrlich predicted mass-starvation. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The only way to avert catastrophic over-population, Ehrlich insisted, was by immediate and radical population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”3

But Ehrlich’s “population bomb” failed to detonate.

Instead of worldwide famine and death, the 1970s witnessed a revolution in food production led by agricultural innovator Norman Borlaug. Despite a doubling of world population over the last fifty years, rates of poverty and hunger have steadily declined, and food production continues to grow as technological advances enable farmers to produce more and more food on each acre of farmland.

Where did Ehrlich go wrong?

The essential flaw in his perspective, Desrochers and Szurmak suggest, is its failure to recognize the power of the “ever expanding human intellect” (p. 50)4 to transcend the limits of nature through technological advances.5

An analogy often used by Ehrlich and similar thinkers is the fate of bacteria in a closed petri dish, which will feed and multiply without restraint until they use up their finite food supply and die off en masse. But this model ignores the fact that, as Desrochers and Szurmak argue,

unique among other species, modern humans transmit information and knowledge between individuals and through time, innovate by combining existing things in new ways, and engage in long-distance trade, thus achieving, to a degree, a decoupling from local limits. (p. xvii)

As one data point among many they reference, consider corn production in the United States. On the “bacteria” premise, one might expect our ability to grow corn to be limited by the availability of arable land and other required agricultural inputs. But in reality, even as US population has grown, corn production has increased by an order of magnitude over 150 years. Thanks to numerous innovations, farmers have been able to produce dramatically more with fewer resources.

Not only have farmers produced more corn per acre, but their yield has completely decoupled from acreage and other inputs such that, according to environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, “American farmers have quintupled corn [production] while using the same or even less land.” “Crucially,” he writes,

rising yields have not required more tons of fertilizer or other inputs. The inputs to agriculture have plateaued and then fallen — not just cropland but nitrogen, phosphates, potash, and even water.

Multiply this kind of “decoupling” between production and resources across all industries and it becomes clear that mankind is not constrained by the same limitations applicable to blindly multiplying bacteria.

And it sheds light on why throughout history prophets of doom such as Ehrlich have always failed so dramatically in their predictions.

A long history of failed predictions . . . and improved human well-being

One of the chief values of Population Bombed! is its comprehensive historical research.

Paul Ehrlich was far from the first person to make spectacularly wrong predictions based on fear of unchecked population growth. For centuries, there have been thinkers who’ve expressed the idea that mankind’s impact on its environment is inherently destructive, and that an ever-increasing human population will soon find itself unable to marshal the resources needed for continued survival.

The works of such thinkers and their critics have given rise to a long-standing historical debate between “two main perspectives on the relationship between humans and nature,” which Desrochers and Szurmak designate as the “pessimists” versus the “optimists.”

One [the optimist perspective] argues that we can and should reshape the natural world for our own benefit. The other is that humanity should live within natural limits and that failing to do so will result in considerable harm. (p. 7)

Arguably, these competing perspectives go back millennia, but their modern form is generally traced to Thomas Malthus’s 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population. Anticipating Ehrlich by two centuries, Malthus famously argued, on mathematical grounds, that unchecked population growth must inevitably outstrip food production causing mass starvation and strife.

But just as Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe came at the exact moment that Norman Borlaug’s innovations were transforming agriculture, Malthus published his essay right when the burgeoning industrial revolution was massively expanding man’s productive capacity — rendering his alarmist predictions failures, too.

Since the time of Malthus and his critics, thinkers from these opposite perspectives have returned again and again to these issues and, according to Desrochers and Szurmak, “the same ideas about resources, development, environment and population have been reborn — or, perhaps, recycled — every generation.” (p. 4)

The result has been a vast literature on both sides of this issue — and although Population Bombed!, itself, is relatively slim and concise, readers interested in exploring environmental issues in more detail will find the book an invaluable summary of, and guide to, that literature.

Although the book gives a fair analysis of the chief arguments offered by both schools of thought, Desrochers and Szurmak find that the balance of evidence comes out unequivocally supporting the “optimist” school.

Numerous authors, they write, have “documented and synthesized recent trends using a vast array of credible sources” (p. 59) — including such “data-filled books” as Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Reviewing these works, Desrochers and Szurmak find that every prediction of impending environmental catastrophe based on the “pessimists’” premises has been dramatically wrong, again and again. Instead there has been dramatic improvement in every aspect of human flourishing.

As a result of “spontaneous market processes” — which includes two centuries of population growth, industrialization, and a steadily increasing global standard of living — every measure of human well-being has steadily improved over the past two hundred years and continues to do so.

Indeed, even when it comes to measures of “environmental quality,” the data shows the opposite of the “pessimists’” expectations.

Market processes improve “environmental quality”

In an especially valuable chapter, Desrochers and Szurmak explain some of the market processes that drive continued growth and human flourishing. And they find that the same market incentives that brought about the steady, continuous improvements in economic measures of human well-being have also resulted in steady improvements in “environmental indicators.”

Where the “pessimist” perspective takes it for granted that any improvement in standard of living must come at the expense of a livable environment, Desrochers and Szurmak find that market processes “simultaneously deliver economic and environmental benefits.” (p. 63)

We’ve already seen, above, the phenomenon of “decoupling” — whereby innovation results in greater productive returns despite constant or even decreasing demand on resources. “In a competitive context,” explain Desrochers and Szurmak, “creative individuals have every incentive to develop production processes that generate more or better output using less input.” (p. 66)

Similar incentives drive the phenomenon of “substitution” — the replacement of one type of resource with another that can fill the same economic need. The ability to use natural gas for heating instead of wood, for instance, not only provides a cleaner and less expensive source of heat, but it also reduces demand for firewood. Partly as a result of this substitution (as well as other factors), the amount of forest acreage in the United States — which was on a steady decline from the colonial period through the early 20th century — has been gradually increasing in the last hundred years. (p. 99)6

Even reductions in pollution have been driven by competition and the profit-motive, according to Desrochers and Szurmak, incentivized by the “development of valuable by-products out of what used to be polluting production waste.” (p. 65) The most fascinating section of Population Bombed!, in my view, is one that briefly reviews historical examples of industries in which competition “gave corporate managers a strong incentive to turn waste into wealth.” (p. 72)

Desrochers and Szurmak offer the following summary of their “reading of the evidence on resource availability and the environmental impact of increased consumption”:

• Non-renewable resources are more abundant than ever before.

• Most environmental indicators in advanced economies and in many developing ones show marked signs of improvement.

• Predictions of future collapse by past pessimistic writers, whether based on resource scarcity or the environmental impact of increased production and consumption, have not come to pass.

• The best predictor of long-term population trends, the total fertility rate, has been declining since the early 1960s. Even though we disagree with the pessimists that human population growth is a problem, the available evidence does not support their alarmist forecasts of critical overcrowding far into the future.

• The problems and threats described by pessimistic writers are typically based on models, scenarios and conjectures rather than time series of environmental data showing actual damage from the use of modern technologies and/or increased consumption. (p. 116)

This last point is especially relevant to the parallels that Population Bombed! draws to current predictions about climate change.

The climate change issue as essentially similar to past environmental scares

Desrochers and Szurmak acknowledge that their focus is not on systematically reviewing “the scientific details and economic controversies surrounding the climate change debate” which “have been discussed in much more detail elsewhere.” (p. 129) In keeping with the character of Population Bombed! as a valuable literature guide, they refer their readers instead to reputable secondary sources on these topics.

Their primary focus is on exploring the historical roots of climate change as an environmental issue. And they find that it has grown out of the same intellectual framework as all the previous environmental scares.

The essential flaw in environmentalist thinking, as we’ve seen, is its failure to recognize the power of human reason to transcend the supposed limits of nature.

In the case of fears over population and resources, this means a failure to recognize how trade and specialization in a division-of-labor society have allowed an ever-growing population to create unimaginable levels of wealth out of fewer and fewer “natural” resources.

In the case of climate change, the same error takes the form of a failure to recognize the extent to which carbon-fueled industrial development has made people dramatically safer from climate disasters than ever before in human history. Our ability to build resilience against climate extremes comes from the same source as our ability to overcome resource constraints: the rational human mind.

In both cases, the “doomsday scenarios” offered by environmentalists are “based on theoretical frameworks and computer-generated scenarios rather than longitudinal time series demonstrating actual harm or degradation.” (p. 129)

Desrochers and Szurmak trace the links between proponents of population alarmism and climate alarmism, and the development of the climate issue into the central concern of the environmentalist movement. They find that “much recent thinking is often nothing more than a repackaging of long-debunked arguments.” (p. 5)

But this raises the question of why these thinkers cling to those “long-debunked arguments” in the face of so much contrary evidence. No matter how overwhelmingly the data shows dramatic improvement in every measure of human well-being — even measures of “environmental quality” — environmentalists continue to sound new alarms, the climate change issue being simply the latest in a long series.

“Every generation,” observe Desrochers and Szurmak, “believes that a new global environmental catastrophe changes everything and warrants severe constraints on population and economic growth.” (p. xviii)

Why is that?

“Why do pessimists resist reality?”

To explain this stubborn defiance of reality requires an examination of the goals and basic ideas driving the environmentalist movement, an analysis of environmentalism as an ideological movement. Unfortunately, this is the weakest aspect of Population Bombed!

At one point, taking the purported goals of the environmentalist movement at face value, Desrochers and Szurmak argue:

If the key to truly sustainable development is a reduction of human impact on sensitive ecosystems, then the available evidence suggests that economic development based on ever more globalized trade, greater use of carbon fuels and continuous innovation seems preferable to greater material deprivation and increased reliance on local renewable resources.

By contrast, however, the assumptions built into frameworks and models of environmental doom seem more reflective of their authors’ lack of understanding or dislike of economic development, market processes (and especially a misunderstanding of the true incentives created by the profit motive), carbon fuels and technological advances rather than actual negative environmental trends. [Emphasis added] (p. 116)

But this leaves open the question of what explains that “lack of understanding or dislike” of economic development and market processes, and the fact that environmentalists seem to find greater material deprivation “preferable”?

To try to explain why “pessimists resist reality,” Desrochers and Szurmak spend a chapter delving into the psychology literature on cognitive biases and considering the “dynamics of socially based decision-making.” (p. 148) While the ideas they draw from “psychologists, political scientists, and other researchers” might offer some insight, in the end they don’t sufficiently explain the environmentalist movement’s philosophically consistent hostility toward freedom and human progress.

I have argued in the past that most people have a mistaken view of environmentalism, seeing it as a movement whose goal is simply to preserve a livable environment so that we, and future generations, may continue to prosper.

But if that were true, then one would expect to find environmentalists celebrating the abundant evidence that market processes “simultaneously deliver economic and environmental benefits.” Instead, as we’ve seen, they dismiss that evidence and continue to predict imminent catastrophes based on their “theoretical frameworks and computer-generated scenarios.”

The problem is not that they are “pessimists.” The problem is that their actual goal is not, in fact, to promote human well-being, but to protect nature from human encroachment. The core premise underlying environmentalism is that “nature must be protected, not for man, but from man.”7

By the standard of human well-being, there isn’t really any meaningful distinction between “economic” and “environmental” improvement. The purpose of all productive human activity is to improve man’s quality of life, which includes developing and improving his physical surroundings — i.e., his environment.

But that sort of “environmental improvement” is not what environmentalists have in mind. As Desrochers and Szurmak report, it’s taken for granted as a “built-in assumption” to equate “wealth creation and negative environmental outcomes” (p. 102) and to “equate smaller population numbers and greater material poverty with lesser environmental impact.” (p. 107)

This is because the ultimate goal of the environmentalist movement is to prevent any form of human impact on untouched wilderness. So any form of economic development — which necessarily involves some kind of impact on nature — is automatically viewed as destructive and as necessarily leading to future catastrophe.

While Population Bombed! does not, in the end, offer a fully satisfactory explanation of the motives underlying environmentalism, the copious evidence that it does offer strongly supports a more fundamental understanding of the movement based on an analysis of its philosophical premises.

To find such an analysis, take a look at Ayn Rand’s illuminating discussion of the burgeoning “ecology” movement as it existed in the 1960s. (See, in particular, her essays “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” and “The Left: Old and New.”)

What Population Bombed! does offer is a refreshing perspective on environmental issues and a badly needed corrective to the hysteria that dominates the cultural conversation today. Anyone seeking a more sober and rational perspective on environmental issues, and on the environmentalist movement, will find much of value in Population Bombed!

Rand came to America 100 years ago this February as an expatriate from Soviet Russia. She was indignant at the question in 1973, no doubt, because she saw clearly the fate that awaited her had she not escaped. She knew that, as an outspoken anti-communist, individualist writer, she would not have survived Soviet persecution. So, in 1926, she applied for a visa to travel to the U.S. to study the film industry. While she had assured both Soviet and American immigration officials that she planned to return to the USSR to share what she had learned, this was never her intention.

Immigration was not a subject of cultural controversy in the heyday of Rand’s career as a political commentator, as it is in ours. So, she never explicitly wrote about such a controversy in her nonfiction essays. She does, of course, endorse free trade as “the essence of capitalism’s foreign policy.” She also endorsed Isabel Paterson’s characterization of free trade, in which “any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.”2 Free trade obviously includes the freedom of movement.

Still, opponents of freedom of immigration are incredulous that it is implied by the principles of capitalism. The questioner in 1973 thinks it would be against the self-interest of a nation’s citizens to allow freedom of immigration that lowers a country’s standard of living. Rand replies forcefully that the questioner has no understanding of her conception of individualist self-interest: freedom of immigration does not have this effect and, even assuming it did, rational self-interest could never include the right to forcibly bar others’ freedom to trade, move and compete, violating their right to pursue their own self-interest.

In any case, no one who is familiar with Rand’s most famous works should be surprised for a moment by her position on immigration. Her most famous works are also the works that bear the mark of her own experience as an immigrant and of her empathy for other individuals fighting the same battle. I’m speaking, of course, of her fiction.

Rand’s fiction does not focus on the immigration of non-Americans into America. It does, however, portray the plight of the migrant, more abstractly considered. Three out of four of her major works of fiction portray heroes and heroines who must seek refuge somewhere far away from home to live in freedom — whether or not in another national jurisdiction.

Like all of Rand’s fictional heroes and like Rand herself, Rand’s heroes are unwilling to settle for a life of stagnation or oppression. They risk everything to find a better life somewhere else, even when it means picking up stakes and (often) breaking ties with everyone they know.

Anyone who appreciates Rand’s heroes would do well to ponder how their stories relate to the current immigration debate. To assist them, I will highlight the relevant aspects of these stories.

(Note: this essay contains plot spoilers.)

We the Living

We the Living, Rand’s semi-autobiographical account of life under communism in Soviet Russia, was her first novel, and the one that most obviously tells the story of the spirit of one exceptionally brave and fiercely independent would-be migrant to the West, Kira Argounova.

Like Rand herself, Kira and her family are uprooted from their native St. Petersburg by the Russian Civil War. Kira flees home with her family to the distant Crimea (in present-day Ukraine) to take refuge from the Reds behind White Russian lines. When the Reds are victorious, they return to a renamed Petrograd where they have lost everything: her father’s business, their home, most material comforts, and their freedom (they are regularly conscripted into street labor and forbidden from most other jobs).

Throughout the story, for Kira and her family the “magic words” that give them distant hope are “from abroad”: news of possible action against the Soviets, rare, smuggled cosmetics, the latest operettas, news of unheard-of comforts and freedoms — and hope of refuge abroad.3

Kira then tries to flee Russia when her lover Leo pays black market figures who “smuggle human flesh” to take them to Germany.4 “Beyond the snow was the world; beyond the snow was that consummate entity to which the country behind them bowed reverently, wistfully, tragically: Abroad. Life began beyond the snow.”5 But they are intercepted by the Red Baltic Fleet, and Leo is imprisoned. Only chance decency from the powerful gets him out.

For a while Kira dreams of becoming an engineer in Russia, but her hopes are dashed when she is expelled from the university for her bourgeois origins. She watches workers at a building site, imagining herself as an engineer, but realizing it will never happen in Russia. She still has hope: “And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: ‘Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .’”6

Leo nearly dies from tuberculosis and then is psychologically destroyed as he is cut off from all avenues of meaningful work. Kira sees him falling apart but saves money from his work in the black market: “For the escape. For Europe. . . . We’ll do it . . . some day.”7 But when Leo is arrested for his black marketeering, he breaks. She now has nothing left in Russia. She proclaims this to a member of the secret police:

Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself? And who — in this damned universe — who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left — look! . . . . Well, here I am! Here’s what’s left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life.8

With Leo gone, Kira makes a last, desperate attempt to get out of this airtight cellar — on her own. She applies for a foreign passport but is told it would be pointless because “No foreign country will admit a Russian.”9 She’s told that if she tries to escape, she’ll have no money, no profession, no friends. She does not care. “I want to get out.”10 She knows that human life is more than eating and digesting food.

Her foreign passport is denied. She is indifferent: she knows no one has the right to forbid life to the living and dares to flee the country illegally. She sells everything she can to buy information about a way across the border with Latvia, and a white coat to serve as camouflage as she walks across the border in the snow. Her relatives try one last time to give her hope that things will change for the better. But she bids them farewell.

The ending of We the Living is unforgettable. But as it approaches, we see an expression of the conviction that propels Kira forward to a better life, the view that the misery and evil around her are an aberration and that things must be better, abroad:

She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was awaiting her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.11

Anthem

None of Ayn Rand’s other novels bear the mark of the migrant experience as explicitly as We the Living. But Anthem and Atlas Shrugged feature analogous plot elements, in which heroes, beset by restrictions and oppression in their native land and wanting a better life seek to escape. Even more important, like all of Ayn Rand’s fiction, they portray heroes willing to stake everything for the sake of their happiness.

Anthem is set in a dystopian future society that has regressed to a medieval standard of living because of a global collectivist dictatorship. The word “I” has been replaced by “we.” Equality 7-2521, obviously more intelligent and curious than his peers, longs to be a scientific scholar. But he is assigned a “life Mandate” as a street sweeper. Though torn by guilt for his “sin of preference,” he refuses to accept his lot: he steals away in the night to an abandoned tunnel where he discovers remnants of ancient technology and re-invents the light bulb. Holding out hope that he will be able to become a scholar, he shares his invention with the authorities. But the Council of Scholars condemns him for the crime of thinking for himself and challenging the established “knowledge.”

So, Equality flees from his society, alone into an uninhabited, ungoverned “Uncharted Forest.” In this new freedom, he discovers further remnants of the long-lost civilization, re-discovers the word “I” and abandons the morality that had paralyzed him with guilt. He realizes that the morality that each must serve as a means to others had brought his society to its primitive state.

In rejecting the morality that bound him in service, he realizes he is not tied down to his brothers or his place of birth: “Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the lodestone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.”12 He realizes his happiness is not the means to any other end, but “its own goal.”13 With his new knowledge and conviction, he begins a plan to help his friends escape from the collectivist society and build a new and powerful free society in the Uncharted Forest.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged repeats the pattern of Anthem’s allegory, but tells the story in a more recognizable, contemporary American setting. In this setting, all the nations of the world except America have collapsed into collectivist “People’s States.” Many of those left with ambition and hope for the future, like Argentinean Francisco d’Anconia and Norwegian Ragnar Danneskjöld, have come to America. But America is rapidly turning into a People’s State itself. The world of Atlas Shrugged represents the horror of a world where there is no longer any “abroad” left to which anyone can flee.

Like Equality, John Galt in Atlas is also an innovative genius who has invented an electrical wonder (a new source of power). But he is never tempted to share his invention with his society once he realizes the depth of its demand for his sacrifice. So, he destroys all remnants of his invention and quits his job as a researcher.

Rather than escaping to an uncharted wilderness as Equality does, Galt convinces his friends Francisco and Ragnar to go on strike with him, withdrawing the intellectual value they add to the world. Eventually they take refuge with other strikers in the American wilderness, in a valley in the Colorado mountains. Each of them is an ambitious individual who is unwilling to settle for the role of well-fed slave in the collapsing world.

Like Equality, Galt wants to rescue his friends and comrades in spirit from the collapsing world. But he struggles to convince them to join. To achieve this goal, he formulates a new moral philosophy, giving full and conscious voice to the values of ambitious people pursuing their own happiness through creative production. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden eventually join, but not without first having to break free from one form or another of the same errors that tied Equality to his society. But like Equality, Galt and the other strikers hope eventually to rebuild society when the country collapses and the road is clear. And this is the society Galt envisions:

Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.14

Here it is hard not to see that Galt wants to make America a refuge for those who would escape the rest of the world’s People’s States. He does not imagine that all who come will be paragons of virtue. Some will be irresponsible, but in the society he creates, none of these will have the power to drag others down with them.

A sanctuary for free minds

In 1946, just after she had begun work on Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was also at work on a screenplay dramatizing the history of the development of the American atomic bomb. Though the screenplay for “Top Secret”would never be completed, nor the movie ever made, her research notes draw connections between many of the themes we’ve already explored. The atomic bomb was a quintessential American innovation made possible by the relative freedom in America vs. in the Axis nations — and by the minds of the immigrants fleeing those nations:

The fact is that Germany did not, could not and never would have created the atomic bomb; nor Italy; nor Russia. . . .

Is it an accident that since the beginning of the machine age, all the great, basic, epoch-making inventions and discoveries [“the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the motion picture, the radio”] have come from America and England? Mostly from America, secondly from England — and with very few contributions from all the other countries. Why? Anglo-Saxon superiority? No. The inventors were of all races and nationalities. But they all had to work either in America or in England. . . . If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains — that only free men could have achieved it — we really deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our particular heads.15

Rand goes on to speak of how Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner all had to flee various statist dictatorships to continue their work. “They could not continue to work there. They had to escape to a free country.”16 Rand’s notes for Lise Meitner’s story are particularly evocative, as it must have reminded her of her own story escaping Soviet Russia:

Lise Meitner is forced to leave Germany. On the train going to the frontier, she is snubbed and pushed around by arrogant Nazi brown-shirts; the Nazi State has damned her on three counts: the old are useless, women are useless, Jews are useless. She sits alone in a corner of the train, her mind intent on the inexplicable experiment; she makes calculations on a piece of paper. A solution occurs to her suddenly; it is a stunning solution — but she must keep quiet about it. At the frontier, Nazis search her luggage: they take from her an old camera, a typewriter, and other physical objects of such nature; nothing of value to the State, they declare, can be taken out of Germany. We see a close-up of Lise Meitner — the broad forehead, the intelligent eyes. What she is taking out is in her mind.17

Ayn Rand saw America as an important sanctuary for free minds who rebel against oppressive regimes. She held that even when they sought refuge from an enemy nation during the deadliest war in human history.

Ayn Rand’s fiction is well known for celebrating heroic individuals who create value in the pursuit of their happiness and so defy tyrannical governments who would suppress them. And for Rand the quest for happiness is morally sacred: each of us has the right to pursue our happiness to the ends of the earth.

It’s no wonder then that some of Rand’s heroes and heroines literally go to the ends of the earth — as she did herself when she immigrated to America. So there should be no confusion why she would later say she could never advocate the restriction of immigration. Anyone surprised by this does not grasp the moral meaning of Ayn Rand’s fiction.

“Is it good to live as ethical a life as possible?” This question is at the heart of a recent book by Larissa MacFarquhar called Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help.

The book focuses on people whom MacFarquhar calls “do-gooders.” Do-gooders, as she explains, are not those who commit to charity work on Saturday afternoons, nor are they people who heroically respond to an extraordinary situation and then return to normal life. Do-gooders are people who devote their lives, energies, and resources full time to serving others, sacrificing their own security, comfort, enjoyment, personal goals, and freedom to such a degree that they make other people uneasy.

Through a series of extended vignettes of real-life do-gooders, interspersed with her own connecting commentary, MacFarquhar prompts readers to consider whether such people are moral exemplars whom they should be emulating, or whether these do-gooders have gone wrong in some way by taking morality too far.

What the book reveals is an entrenched and deeply problematic way of thinking about morality — one that has tragic consequences.

Equating morality with altruism

The do-gooder, writes MacFarquhar, “is the person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible . . . who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable.”¹ What do-gooders have in common “is that they consider it their duty to help other people.”(11) “The usual way to do good,” she writes, “is to help those who are near you.”(4) But the do-gooder feels that he must help strangers just as much as anyone else. He is “moved not by a sense of belonging but by the urge to do as much good as he can.” (5; emphasis added)

So, what does it look like for a do-gooder to live “as ethical a life as possible” and to “do as much good as he can”? Consider a few excerpts from the lives of the do-gooders that MacFarquhar highlights.

There is Aaron and his girlfriend Jen:

During graduate school, [he] arranged his classes so he could volunteer at Food Not Bombs on Fridays. That was awful work. He’d get up before dawn on a frigid Boston morning to show up in a tiny alley, with excrement everywhere, to lift box after box out of a van until his knuckles bled, and then he’d toil in a hot basement kitchen, making meals. . . . (45-6)

Laundry would pile up in his room, dishes in the sink. He would make large batches of food to save money . . . and leave crusted pans and bowls all over the kitchen. When she complained, he told her that time spent washing dishes could be time spent working for animal rights, which were more important. She couldn’t think of a good counterargument to that . . . . [A]ll she could say, when she felt herself going crazy, . . . was, “But I need it, I want it, I’m asking you.” . . . (48-9)

They got married in 1999. . . . The marriage lasted two years. One of the hardest parts of the breakup for Jen was that she now had to admit to herself that she wasn’t the ethical person she’d thought she was. She was not just leaving Aaron; she was choosing selfishness. She was choosing her own happiness over the survival of other creatures. (52-3)

Then there is Dorothy and Charles:

Charles was living on sixty-two dollars a month, earning a tiny wage working as a carpenter; Dorothy worked part time in a nursing home, and threw herself into her activism. Charles taught her how to Dumpster-dive for food . . . .

At one point early on, when they were living in one room together in a shared house, Charles told Dorothy he thought they should live on the street. They were using money to pay rent that they could give away to people who needed it more . . . . [Dorothy refused.] [Dorothy:] “We used to fight — he was always adding up every penny, he kept a notebook. Once, he told me that I was thirty-eight cents over budget. I said, ‘Would you repeat what you just said?’ And then I told him what he could do with his World Equity Budget.” (31-2)

MacFarquhar observes that we feel ambivalent about such individuals and the way they live their lives.

Ambivalence toward do-gooders also arises out of a deep uncertainty about how a person ought to live. Is it good to try to live as moral a life as possible — a saintly life? Or does a life like that lack some crucial human quality? Is it right to care for strangers at the expense of your own people? Is it good to bind yourself to a severe morality that restricts spontaneity and freedom? . . . (6)

Suppose you don’t aspire to be a do-gooder; how much can morality demand of you? Is your life your own, to spend as you like, or do you owe some of it to other people? And if you do owe something, then how much? The moral question here is less one of quality — What should I do? — than of quantity: When can I stop? (61)

MacFarquhar’s framing of the problem is revealing. She assumes that the question of the content of morality (What should I do?) is settled: morality is basically a matter of “helping others,” which here means placing the interests of other people above one’s own. In other words, she equates morality with altruism.

She mentions, in passing, other moral obligations, such as paying one’s debts and telling the truth, but notes that these can be fulfilled while leading a perfectly normal (non-altruistic) life of career, personal goals, family, and enjoyment. The do-gooder, on the other hand, makes helping others his overriding moral concern, making any kind of normal life impossible. The do-gooder, in short, is the full-time altruist — i.e., one who lives for others as his central moral duty and rule of life.

This equation of morality and altruism explains why the author sees her book as a book about morality, rather than about an altruistic approach to morality. It is why she frames the book’s central question as: “Is it good to live as ethical a life as possible?” rather than “Is it good to live as altruistic a life as possible?” And it is why she thinks the moral question one needs to grapple with is one of quantity (When can I stop living for others?), rather than one of quality (Should I live for others?).

MacFarquhar is by no means unique in thinking about morality in this way; it is in fact quite conventional. It is also quite dangerous.

Altruism as the source of the dilemma

The equation of morality with altruism is precisely what generates the fundamental conflict between morality and life that MacFarquhar’s book illustrates.

For if morality means “helping others,” then living “as ethical a life as possible” means helping others as much as possible — in fact, devoting one’s life entirely to it, sacrificing to the greatest extent possible one’s own interests in the service of that moral end.

Of course, few people aspire to live a do-gooder’s life. To the extent that they value their own interests, it strikes most as too “extreme” to live like that — it would involve more sacrifice than they are willing to make. But given the prominence of altruism as a respected moral ideal, many find it hard not to concede that the do-gooders are in fact morality’s saints, and thus the questions that MacFarquhar raises understandably surface in people’s minds: How much (sacrifice) can morality demand of me? And is it good to live as ethical (i.e., as sacrificial) a life as possible?

According to this way of thinking about morality, if one pursues one’s interests and sacrifices little or not at all, one must accept immorality as a permanent state, or abandon morality altogether. Yet, if one sacrifices everything in one’s devotion to morality, one gives up everything that makes one’s life worth living. MacFarquhar formulates this conflict quite clearly:

This is the core of it. There is decency, and honor, and ordinary humanness, and family, and children, and life — and then there is saintliness. There is everything you love about the world — everything that, if you found yourself shipwrecked on a distant planet, or close to death, you would most inconsolably remember of your earthly life — and then there is saintliness. (269)

In other words, the consistent practice of the morality of altruism (“saintliness”) requires sacrificing “everything you love about the world.” Even do-gooders must turn a blind eye to what their morality requires of them in order to survive. As MacFarquhar puts it: “any do-gooder who is not dead or irredeemably jaundiced by the age of thirty has learned to acquire a degree of blindness in order to get by.” (299)

But what MacFarquhar fails to realize is that this tragic clash between life and morality is not necessitated by morality as such or by being “extremely” (i.e., consistently) moral; it is generated by a specific conception of what morality is (altruism) and of what it demands (self-sacrifice).

Breaking the equation

The question of quality, as MacFarquhar puts it — the question “What should I do?” — i.e., of the content and goal of morality, is a deeply important question, and not one that should be taken for granted, as if the answer were simple or obvious just because one particular answer — in this case, altruism — has long dominated the cultural mainstream.

It is important to be aware of the fact that there are major moral theories that do not treat service to others as the central (or even a major) aim of morality. The best example of such an approach in the ancient (pre-Christian) world is the moral philosophy developed by Aristotle.

Aristotle held that the goal of ethics is something that we need to identify — it is not obvious, and there are competing views about what that goal is. Aristotle’s own view is that the goal of ethics is the achievement of one’s own happiness and well-being, as an end in itself — and he identified a host of virtues of mind and character that such a goal requires and entails. The moral ideal, according to Aristotle, is the individual who is fully rational in every aspect of his life and, as a result, possesses a tremendous, earned, self-esteem. Such a man does not surrender his interests — he seeks the best and the highest.2

The most significant modern development along Aristotelian lines is the moral philosophy of “rational selfishness” developed by Ayn Rand. Rational selfishness, as I have summarized it elsewhere, means “pursuing the values and practicing the virtues that objectively sustain and enrich one’s own life, not just in the immediate moment, but over the course of one’s entire life. It means living by the judgment of one’s own mind, by one’s own productive effort, and enjoying the results — materially and spiritually.”3 On such a view of morality, one’s attitude toward others is not “How can I sacrifice for them?” but “What values can I gain by interacting with them?” — values such as love, admiration, trade, knowledge, inspiration, friendship, enjoyment, etc.

In other words, philosophers like Aristotle and especially Rand treat an individual’s own life and happiness as the goal of ethics, and as a result they project a very different conception of a moral exemplar.

Given how culturally deep-seated altruism is as a moral framework, it can be difficult to take seriously other approaches to morality, or to even recognize them as approaches to morality, rather than as alternatives to morality. This is because the philosophical ideas one accepts, or simply absorbs from the culture, become part of the framework through which one views life, and one can easily forget that there are other frameworks — ones that lead to very different visions of a moral life.

As a colleague of mine wrote recently: “Having a worldview is like having a pair of glasses you forgot you’re wearing. What happens when you take them off for a moment and try on a different pair?”

Seeking a new moral perspective

It is from this perspective that I want to conclude with Stephanie — the final do-gooder featured in MacFarquhar’s book — because this woman’s tortured struggle to set herself free from the grip of altruism illustrates perfectly the deep moral conflict and the damage caused by altruism — as well as the need for a new approach to morality.

Stephanie’s religious upbringing instilled a deep sense of guilt in her, but she was “devout and unquestioning.” (284) Just before college, however, doubts began to surface. She studied philosophy in college and went on to pursue graduate studies in the field. She struggled with her faith until she realized that she was not a believer anymore. She found a job teaching philosophy at a small Catholic college and married a man who was zealously “trying to save the world” — a full-time altruist, a do-gooder — and she became wrapped up in altruistic causes and the “effective altruism” movement.

Over the years, however, she began to question and reconsider her moral outlook. Here is an extended quotation from the book that is worth reading in full because it captures her moral courage, her self-reflection, and her plight:

If she truly committed herself to saving the world as she ought to, she thought, she would never have fun anymore — she wouldn’t be able to travel, she would never go to beautiful places. . . . She would have to cut out of her life the things she loved, one by one, until there were none left. . . . She always felt guilty . . . . (291)

All her life, she had believed that there was something fundamentally bad about her; but now she thought that maybe she had simply been wrong about this. . . .

It took her a long time to get to this point — several years of guilt and self-laceration — but at the end of it, she no longer believed that she was obliged to dedicate every waking moment to saving the world, or to pry ever more waking moments from her hours of sleep. . . . (292-3)

She had rejected Christianity, she had rejected philosophy, she had rejected unlimited altruism. Now she had nothing left — only herself. It made her happy to think about doing things she wanted to do, but it was also frightening. . . . (293)

“Is it somehow legitimate to say what is valuable is what I consider to be valuable?” she wondered. “Is that okay?” It sounded so subjective to her — so flimsy, so groundless. . . . But what was left? Could you base a life on ideals that you invented? . . . She had rejected moral systems built on centuries of the thought and faith and obedience of millions of people, and now her foundation was going to be herself? It sounded ridiculous. But it was all she had. Is it okay to say, These are the things that I value, this is what I’m going to pursue in life? she wondered. . . . She didn’t know. (293-4)

Stephanie’s case is both hopeful and tragic. She is groping, in effect, for a different pair of glasses, a different lens to view a moral life — one that treats her own life and happiness as legitimate moral ends — but she cannot help thinking that such an approach can only be a flimsy matter of subjective preference.

This is particularly tragic in that a proper education in philosophy should teach any student that there are other moral theories than altruism. Perhaps she encountered such theories but found them unconvincing or too alien. Even more tragic is that she almost certainly didn’t encounter Ayn Rand because too many academic philosophers are unwilling to recognize Rand as a philosopher worth studying, precisely because she presents a radically different philosophical framework.

What advice would MacFarquhar offer to this young lady? She does not say. But the next page of the book features a long quotation from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason praising the elevation of moral duty above life itself.

What would Ayn Rand’s advice be? How would she respond to Stephanie’s question: “Is it okay to say, These are the things that I value, this is what I’m going to pursue in life?”

I think she would say at least two things: First: that not only is it “okay” to pursue one’s own values, it is the essence of a moral life. But, second: one’s personal values must be real values, ones that objectively advance one’s life and happiness. Even if one decides to pursue one’s own happiness as one’s highest goal, all kinds of errors and missteps are possible, so the idea that “what is valuable is what I consider to be valuable” is hopeless as a standard. One needs a rationally defined and validated code of values that gives one real guidance on how to live one’s life in a rational, principled, and life-serving way.

In other words, the way to escape the moral dilemma caused by altruism is not to draw an arbitrary limit here or there on the continuum of sacrifice, but to step outside the moral framework that generates it and find a better morality — one that seeks to advance an individual’s life and happiness.

This is what Rand sought to offer in her novels and philosophic writings. One can only hope that the Stephanies of the world — and anyone else seeking this kind of moral perspective — will find it in time.

American military action against Iran was long overdue. But despite going to war, President Trump has apparently not learned the lesson that eluded his predecessors: Iran’s distinctive Islamist nature is what drives its hostility.

One red flag: asked on March 1st about the war’s political endgame, Trump told the New York Times that, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.”

Days later he again expressed hope that he can simply appoint a new leader, “like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists the U.S. objective in Iran is to degrade Iran’s missile program, not regime change. Even after floating the slogan “unconditional surrender,” Trump mused about welcoming religious leaders in Iran, provided they somehow diverge from current policies.

The idea that the Iranian regime’s policies might change for the better simply by appointing a more pliable leader, as in Venezuela, is a delusion.

While Maduro’s Venezuela had its roots in the socialist ideology of Hugo Chavez, socialism’s power to motivate fails when the earthly goods it promises fail to materialize. When that happened, it’s no surprise that the Venezuelan state was captured by cartels who made it a haven for drug trafficking and money laundering. Delcy Rodriguez herself has long been a key figure in the Cartel of the Suns, perhaps the power behind Maduro’s throne all along. Rodriguez seems to care about little more than maintaining her power. She can plausibly be counted on to do Trump’s bidding, else face the same punishment as Maduro — though it’s premature to deem this setup a success.

Whereas Venezuela is led by thugs and gangsters, Iran is an ideologically driven militant regime.

Iran’s 1979 revolution created an Islamist regime led by a clerical “supreme leader.” Its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, established a religious dictatorship that subjugates the Iranian people under sharia law, while zealously exporting its dogma by force. The constitution embraces “the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world” (citing a Koranic verse [8:60]). “Martyrs” sacrificing themselves for this cause are celebrated. The regime glorified one 13-year-old boy who strapped grenades to his body and threw himself under an enemy tank; his face appeared on postage stamps and banknotes. This extolling of self-sacrifice has roots in Iranian Shiism.

Iran’s revolution galvanized the Islamist movement across the world. Iran not only taught jihadists that their nihilistic goal is realizable, it also spearheaded the cause, funding, training, arming and coordinating such factions as Hamas and Hezbollah, which sometimes function as its proxies.

The clerics lead chants of “death to America,” condemning it as “the great Satan” to be destroyed, because of our secular, pro-individual freedom society. Iran’s first act of war against us was the 1979 seizure of the embassy in Tehran and the humiliating 444-day captivity of American diplomats. Then came lethal bombings of American targets in Lebanon. Then the enabling and arming of Iraqi insurgents slaughtering U.S. troops. Iran has been waging a religious war against America for decades. Our presidents since Jimmy Carter have failed to recognize that.

Trump’s notion that “what we did in Venezuela” would be “perfect” for Iran is beyond ludicrous. It projects a leadership of anti-ideological dealmakers like himself. But Iran’s regime has proven itself committed to its vicious ideas, which cannot be bought off. A fact underscored by Iran’s violations of the 2015 nuclear deal. An obvious risk of any deal with surviving members of the regime is that they would accept it only as a temporary ploy to fight another day.

To defeat Iran’s Islamist regime, our war planners must keep the regime’s ideology firmly in mind. They are not the gangsters of the Maduro regime, easily bought off or even afraid of death. If our war planners have any end game in mind — and it is scandalous if they do not — they must think about how to facilitate the end of a deeply ideological regime.

Eliminating the threat from Iran’s Islamic totalitarian regime necessitates discrediting its ideology, making it a lost cause. Some may doubt this is possible, in the shadow of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, and indeed, it has been decades since America has followed the right approach. History, however, provides a compelling model.

Consider the lesson from the 1945 defeat of martyrdom-extolling imperial Japan, which offered an “unconditional surrender” only after two atom bombs. The historian John David Lewis has eloquently described American efforts to discredit and uproot the regime’s ideology from schools and government, and to block from political office former regime leaders.

A hopeful sign in Iran: Even before the US-Israeli strikes, countless Iranians have courageously risen up against the theocratic regime, calling for “death to the dictator,” in 2022 during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” mass protests; and then in January, across 180 cities in all 31 provinces (which Tehran brutally crushed). Such protesters deserve our moral support. They could open the way for a secular, non-threatening, peaceful, even friendly, Iran.

Image credit: Arezoo / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

SpaceX’s reusable Falcon Heavy now delivers payloads to orbit for under $700 per pound; Blue Origin’s New Glenn targets a similar price point. SpaceX’s Starship aims to reduce costs further to under 10s of dollars per pound. The industry’s radical cost reduction has enabled entire new sectors: private planetary science missions, commercial space stations, and asteroid mining ventures.

What changed? The legal framework governing space launch services.

Until 1984, the U.S. government maintained a complete monopoly on space launch through NASA and the Department of Defense. Even after the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 technically permitted private launches, NASA effectively blocked commercial competition by using the Space Shuttle program to offer taxpayer subsidized launch services.

The Space Shuttle, despite being pitched as a vehicle to make spaceflight routine and affordable, ultimately cost approximately $29,000 per pound to orbit — roughly ten times more expensive than Apollo’s Saturn V. It also suffered two tragic failures. Meanwhile, NASA acquired and then abandoned the promising Delta Clipper vertical landing rocket in 1996, delaying by two decades the technology that would eventually revolutionize spaceflight.

The industry’s unfettering occurred gradually: the 1990 Launch Services Purchase Act required NASA and the Department of Defense to procure commercial launch services; the 1998 Commercial Space Act declared that “free and competitive markets create the most efficient conditions for promoting economic development” in space; and the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act established a framework for private crewed spaceflight.

The final barrier fell in 2014 when SpaceX successfully challenged the Air Force’s practice of awarding launch contracts exclusively to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a government-created merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s launch businesses. Only then could new entrants compete on equal terms for lucrative military contracts.

The dramatic improvements made possible by this expanded freedom aren’t merely about better management or technology. They reflect the fundamental difference between government and market approaches to innovation. NASA secures funding through taxation — the forcible expropriation of wealth — by convincing politicians that its programs serve political objectives. Private companies must convince investors to voluntarily provide capital to create commercially viable ventures.

This distinction creates entirely different measures of success. When entrepreneurs are free, they must integrate scientific possibilities with economic realities to deliver valuable services at competitive prices. Success is measured objectively by profitability, which enables increased investment in improved technology. When innovation is administered by the government, “success” is determined by political factors disconnected from economic reality.

The old space industry employed brilliant scientific thinkers, but, because its course was controlled by government force, it necessarily lacked the brilliant entrepreneurial thinkers required for self-sustaining technological progress. Scientists discover what is physically possible, and, when given the freedom to do so, entrepreneurs discover what is economically possible. Together, they transform those possibilities into world-changing realities.

For this progress to continue and to accelerate, the space industry must not merely benefit from its newfound freedom but actively defend it. To this end, the industry must demand that governments take affirmative steps to protect its freedom. The 2015 SPACE Act, Florida’s 2023 Spaceflight Entity Liability Bill, and similar legislation are important steps toward protecting property rights and defining liabilities in space. But more must be done.

For example, as orbital space becomes more crowded, some regions of orbital space may be made unusable by a cascade of colliding objects. Whatever the technical fix, entities that place and operate satellites in stable orbits should be recognized as having a property right not only in the satellites but in the orbits they occupy. Such a property rights framework would recognize the freedom of those creating value in orbital space to continue to do so while avoiding both a tragedy of the commons and more of the central planning that has hobbled space exploration.

America leads in space technology because it has led in the expansion of economic freedom to launch and to explore. By removing barriers to innovation and establishing clear rights and liabilities, we can ensure that the space industry continues or even accelerates its rapid progress. As the cost of reaching orbit falls below $100 per pound, entirely new possibilities will emerge that we can scarcely imagine today.

After fifty years of stagnation, the space industry has finally been unleashed. To secure continued progress in the space industry and to bring its dynamism to other cutting-edge industries, we must recognize and double down on the defense of its essential catalyst: freedom.

Image Credit: peepo / E+ / via Getty Images

Philosophy is often thought to be an “ivory tower” pursuit, unconcerned with the practical affairs of everyday life. Philosophers who want to promote the relevance of their field invariably point to one branch of philosophy that seems to have obvious implications for our action in the world: ethics, the study of right and wrong.

But we do not see the masses beating down the doors of university philosophy departments seeking practical advice about important life decisions. Students typically take ethics classes to fulfill a requirement, not to answer burning questions. Few if any books about ethics by philosophers make the best-seller lists. Why have today’s academic ethicists failed so miserably to sell the merits of their research?

Revealing puzzles in academic ethics

A recent story from inside the world of academic ethics provides some important clues about the cause of its apparent irrelevance.

In a post at the blog of the American Philosophical Association speculating about what is missing from today’s ethics education (and what might account for character flaws of ethics professors), philosophy professor Michael Sigrist gives a useful list of cases typically covered by academic ethics textbooks: “abortion, torture, charity, meat eating, prostitution, organ markets, climate change, poverty, gun control, procreation, reproductive rights, and so forth.” This list of topics tells us something important about how today’s ethicists conceive of the subject of their field.

Sigrist suggests that there is something in common among all of these cases: they are of “public, not personal, concern.” He thinks this explains why academic ethics seems irrelevant to so many: it might help us form the right views about public policy, but it offers little guidance on how to become a good person. “Ethical thinking that aims to be public and impersonal, and ethical thinking that arises from the substance and particularity of an individual’s real life, are not the same thing.”¹

It’s true that most of today’s ethics courses don’t deal with the “substance and particularity” of an individual person’s real life.” But is this because philosophers are obsessed with public policy, or is there something more to it?

Another example of a puzzle prized by academics, unmentioned by Sigrist, suggests a different explanation. Ethicists have spilled gallons of ink debating the “trolley problem”: should you switch tracks if you are on a runaway trolley that is about to run over a group of people at the cost of running over only one? This scenario and countless variations on it are now the subject of a whole cottage industry in academic ethics, jokingly referred to as “trolleyology.”2 But it’s a scenario that scarcely anyone in private or public life will ever face, aside from characters in a fantasy sitcom.3 (More on that shortly.)

What is really behind the peculiar set of cases studied by so many academic ethicists today?

The emptiness of solving puzzles about conflict

Each and every one of the textbook cases involves a situation in which the interests of the parties involved are thought to come into conflict. This is a clue as to why ethicists focus on them: each is a case in which ethicists think someone’s gain has to come at the expense of someone’s sacrifice.

Take the idea that charity is a major focus of morality. Should you spend your money on yourself, or give it away to alleviate hunger? In the perceived conflict between keeping your luxuries and providing for others’ needs, academic ethicists like Peter Singer argue that you have an obligation to give up your middle-class comforts to help save starving people around the world.4

Or consider abortion. An unwanted fetus is a burden to its mother, but opponents of abortion urge her to sacrifice her interests to it. Supporters of abortion rights instead argue that even if the fetus has interests and rights, the mother’s interests and rights outweigh the fetus’s, and so it is justifiable that the infant is the object of sacrifice.5

The trolley problem is especially instructive. It’s expressly a “thought experiment” that’s made up to test how our ethical “intuitions” respond when some of our most cherished values are artificially placed in conflict with each other. Which do we value more? The life of a loved one stuck on a track, or the lives of numerous innocents who are strangers to us? The lives of numerous strangers, or the integrity of not being the one to push someone onto the track? Ethicists assume that ethics is about formulating principles for selecting the object of sacrifice, and their question is: Who, generally, is to be sacrificed to whom?

When ethics focuses on cases like these, ethicists are seen as referees whose job it is to make calls when players on the moral field of play come into conflict. These calls then demand that one or the other player is expected to sacrifice something, for reasons wholly unrelated to the player’s personal interests.

Unsurprisingly, an ethics focused on resolving conflicts of interest has little advice to give to people who don’t have to make zero-sum decisions. Ethicists like Singer who urge us to give up material comforts for the sake of the needy offer no positive guidance about how to pick a career, how to decide which if any social relationships to pursue, etc. The only advice is to sacrifice the fruits of these activities to those with less. Ethicists with the same focus who argue for abortion rights usually have little to say about what are good and bad reasons for having abortions, for having children, for having sex, for pursuing relationships with others, and so on.

Meanwhile, ethicists studying “trolleyology” have to reach to justify their inquiry by suggesting that it can offer advice for the programmers of self-driving cars.6 Others have even suggested that in the post-coronavirus world, we face a similar dilemma in the decision about whether to maintain the lockdowns or to open the economy.7 But there are many differences between these real-life problems and the academic thought experiment.8 The ethicists who think about trolleys aren’t even interested in offering guidance for how to resolve similar real-life dilemmas, should they ever arise. Their concern is about whether “intuitions” about the thought experiment can support ethical principles — and there is little agreement about whether they do.

Until ethicists can agree about how to support ethical principles for navigating an ordinary life, it’s unlikely that they can answer questions about extraordinary emergency cases.

It’s true that ethical principles are sometimes useful for settling conflicts among people. Notably, the concept of rights serves to help us negotiate boundaries among our lives to help us avoid conflicts in the first place. While this is an important issue in social ethics, the subject of ethics as such is much wider.

Ethics guides choices about character

How should ethicists begin to refocus the subject of their field? Consider a simple desert island case in which there’s no real possibility of social conflict. A castaway like Robinson Crusoe has many decisions to make, and not just about narrowly practical issues like food and shelter. Will he face the fact that he is stranded and learn what is necessary to survive or will he lie to himself and pretend that help is on the way? If he fails at certain tasks, will he try to learn from his mistakes and improve his tactics, or will he resign himself to thinking he is incompetent to survive? Is he really going to value his life and take responsibility for living it, or give up on it and let nature take its course? These choices concern the kind of character Crusoe ends up developing. They are choices of basic moral values.

The basic value choices we face become even more complex in a division of labor society, but they still primarily concern the relationship we have with reality, not just our relationship with others. Will we choose a career according to our own interests and talents, or according to the standards and expectations absorbed uncritically from family and authority figures? Will we choose pleasures that challenge us to squeeze every bit of joy from life, or those that simply dull the pain and emptiness of a life lived passively? Will we choose relationships with others who inspire us to pursue excellence in our chosen path in life, or with those who help us pretend that mediocrity is acceptable? Even this last question, which is expressly about relationships with others, depends on making a choice about the value of your own life.

Ethics concerns our most important choices of action in the world, whether or not they involve relationships with others (to say nothing of conflicting relationships). And ethics isn’t even primarily about choosing between right and wrong actions. It’s about choosing between the right and wrong kind of life, about what kind of character one wants to develop, what kind of person one wants to become. An ethics that focuses only on choices we make about the fringes of life (such as our conflicted relationships with others) doesn’t help us weave the rest of its intertwined fabric.

Outside of the artificial constructs of trolley-scenarios (and real-life dictatorships which really do enforce impossible, Sophie’s Choice–style dilemmas), we do not have to choose between sacrificing others’ interests to ours and sacrificing our own interests to theirs. It’s possible to live an independent existence, guided by values aimed at developing a healthy character.

Recognizing that a life of conflict with others is not inevitable severely undercuts the assumption that the only viable ethical code is one that calls us to sacrifice our own interests for the sake of the alleged interests of others. As Ayn Rand argued, it is the popularity of the altruistic theory of morality (the theory which equates the subject of morality with choices about sacrifice) that we should hold responsible for the widespread view that morality has no relevance to everyday life:

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value . . . .

Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of morality does to a man’s life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all that he can expect. . . . Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.9

The idea that ethics is a code of values one needs to guide one’s life as a whole informs Rand’s own view of moral virtue, which she develops at length in her essay “The Objectivist Ethics.” She was also not the first to see it this way. The whole of ancient Greek ethics, from Socrates through Aristotle to the Stoics had a similar outlook, even as these figures differed in important ways about what a morally virtuous life actually consists in.

If today’s ethicists want to offer real guidance for living, they should revisit their assumption that ethics is only about resolving conflicts and that they are its referees. Life is not a zero-sum game and ethics should not be about solving made-up puzzles that are part of such a game.

Politically, America is falling away ever faster from its founding principle: individual rights. But until America becomes an outright dictatorship, like Cuba or Iran, Americans owe a certain deference to law enforcement officers.

In recognition of the importance of the rule of law, some people argue that the woman shot to death in Minneapolis, Renee Good, should have obeyed the ICE agent’s order to get out of her car. Disobeying a law enforcement officer’s direct order, they say, is wrong, anarchistic, and undermines the rule of law.

“When the police tell you to get out of your vehicle, you do,” they say. “If she had shown that proper respect for law enforcement, she’d be alive today,” some add.

I’m hearing these sentiments from people on my membership site (hbletter.com), people who welcome immigrants and condemn efforts to deport “illegals.”

These political allies are arguing in defense of a genuine and important value: the rule of law as opposed to private, anarchistic violence. But independent of the disputed facts of this particular case, there’s a faulty assumption in their position. They are assuming that ICE is a law enforcement agency, like the police. It isn’t.

There’s a dramatic difference between legitimate law enforcement, operating within formalized constraints — set by long precedent and the Constitution — and the free-range force-wielding of armed agents of an administrative agency.

To concretize this difference, compare what happens to you if the police arrest you and what can happen to you if ICE agents seize you. There’s a difference between detention of citizens and of immigrants — citizens are being detained, but they are not subject (or at least not yet) to the same treatment immigrants are.

(Based on info from Gemini and especially ChatGPT Pro 5.2.)

If Arrested by Police

There’s booking and arraignment before a judge, after which the courts take control; your fate will not be decided by the police or any part of the executive branch of government.

You have a right to a lawyer; if you can’t afford one, the court will appoint a public defender to be your defense attorney.

You are presumed innocent: if the prosecutor cannot affirmatively prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, you are free.

Throughout, there is due process of law.

If Seized by ICE

You are taken to an ICE or Customs and Border Patrol holding facility, where you are searched and interrogated; your belongings may be confiscated. Then ICE, not a court, decides whether to detain you, release you on bail, or use “alternatives to detention,” such as ankle monitoring.

No judge has to review any of this.

You may be subject to Expedited Removal — in which case you can be sent to a pre-deportation holding camp, such as the infamous Alligator Alcatraz facility, and then summarily flown to some foreign country, probably its prison. The brutal prison of a dictatorship may be in store for you, with no due process, no appeal. We’ve already seen that happen.

Who decides whether or not you are subject to Expedited Removal? ICE decides. You get one opportunity to present evidence — but to the ICE agent who arrested you, with the only review being done by an ICE supervisor.

In any of your attempts to show ICE that you shouldn’t be shipped out ASAP to a foreign prison, you are presumed guilty. The burden of proof is on you. They may or may not permit you to have a lawyer — i.e., you do not have one by right.

There is no due process of law.

What’s the condensed, overall, essential difference between police arrest and ICE seizure?

The rule of law vs. the arbitrary decisions of men.

Police Arrest as Law Enforcement

Anyone the police arrest is promptly turned over to an independent branch of government: the judiciary, in accordance with the division of powers, to safeguard the rights of the individual against the power of the state.

The judiciary exists to interpret the law. It has no interest in catering to the White House or “public opinion” (a.k.a. the mob).

ICE Seizure as Fundamentally Different

Anyone seized by ICE remains at the mercy of ICE or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Both agencies are part of the executive branch, headed by the president.

The interest of those who control your fate is to please the White House and the mob.

To make vivid the real meaning of this whole setup, imagine that a Democratic president, operating with support from a Democratic Congress, raises the same hue and cry about income tax evasion that the Republicans have raised about criminal immigrants.

Suppose that this Democratic president sets up within the Internal Revenue Service a division called “Enforcement.” The IRS hires tens of thousands of tough guys to be armed, masked, and sent around the country to conduct raids on homes and businesses, looking for “tax cheats.” In the view of the IRS enforcers, anyone with a big house, luxury automobile, or Rolex watch should be assumed to be a “tax cheat” and has to prove to the IRS enforcers that he isn’t. And assume that the actions of IRS enforcers are shielded from outside review just as the actions of ICE agents are now.

Is this too outrageous? The Left’s demonization of “millionaires and billionaires” closely parallels the Right’s demonization of immigrant hordes of “rapists and narco-terrorists.” Just as the charge of “tax evasion” is a cover for hatred of the self-made man, so the charge of “criminality” among immigrants is a cover for xenophobic fear of anyone who looks different (the Left is correct on that).

The only difference between ICE and the hypothetical IRS enforcement division is that IRS enforcement would keep its victims here, in its own “Alligator Alcatrazes.”

Now, what if some of these armed IRS enforcers saw you in your car protesting them and ordered you to get out of your vehicle? What would you do?

You might obey, out of fear. You might obey to prevent violence, which you know would serve the goals of the Democratic president. Those are real, prudential considerations to weigh.

But I am raising the moral question: Would respect for the rule of law morally oblige you to obey the IRS enforcers and get out of your car?

No. There could be no moral or philosophic reason to treat such “orders” with respect, to pretend that these IRS goons are “officers of the law.”

Even if created by an act of Congress these enforcers would be uncontrolled, hired guns, isolated from the legal system and accountable only to their superiors in the Democratic executive branch, run by the Democratic president.

The moral principle does not change when the party changes from Democratic to Republican.

ICE’s hired guns are not agents of law enforcement. Law enforcement in America is part of the fabric of the whole government, with its separation of powers among the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch, and with the Constitution’s safeguards of rights of the accused. ICE is a paramilitary group operating within the executive branch, answerable to the president.

It is ICE itself that has no respect for the rule of law, not just in the frequently brutal and sometimes deadly behavior of its agents, but in operating as “enforcers” outside the actual legal system.

ICE makes its own rules and is not part of American justice.

As we’ve seen in Minneapolis, ICE is the strutting, swaggering personification of a government of men, not of law.

“Get out of the f—ing car!” an agent barked at Renee Good. After agent Ross shot her in the face, he or another ICE goon muttered, “F—ing bitch!”

Further videos and eyewitness testimony will settle whether or not Ross shot Renee because he was in fear of life or limb. Personally, I’m already convinced that there was no objective threat of serious harm to him. But what’s relevant to this post is only this: Renee had no moral obligation to obey the orders that a pack of untethered, unaccountable goons shouted at her.

If you agree with that analysis, there’s a wider lesson. In evaluating a current event, focus on the essential of the full context. The full context here includes the nature of the American legal system. The purpose of our legal system, of our laws and law enforcement, is to protect individual rights by “placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control.” [Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

What does being under “objective control” mean? I can’t put it better than Rand did in that same essay:

[A] government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. . . . its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled. . . . A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

And the essential of ICE is that it is designed to be arbitrary, uncontrolled power.

The actions of an entity follow from its nature. The tragic death of Renee Good is a logical consequence of letting loose on the country a horde of unaccountable masked gunmen, loyal to their bosses’ boss: Donald Trump.

More deaths are sure to come. I worry that ICE is the nucleus of an elite presidential guard.

A guard against what? Against defeat at the polls. January 6, 2021, may be only the overture to a tribal civil war.

“Tribal” is the right term because both sides are held together not by ideas, not by any understanding of political philosophy, but by their hatred of the other tribe. There can be no victory in a blind struggle of that kind — only fear, destruction, and transient, regional war-lords.

Things don’t have to come to that. A way out is available: a return to the rule of law, not of men.

Image Credits: Star Tribune via Getty Images

Editor’s note:

In January 2026, The University of Pittsburgh Press released its fourth volume in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series. The latest volume, edited by philosophers James G. Lennox and Gregory Salmieri, Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand, compares and contrasts and explores the historical connection between Ayn Rand and Aristotle, the only philosopher to whom she acknowledged a significant philosophical debt. The Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to reprint (with permission), an excerpt from this volume, Salmieri's own major survey of Rand and Aristotle's ethics.

“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.”
AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED

It is with this sentence from Atlas Shrugged that Ayn Rand began her first exposition of her mature moral philosophy.1 The Aristotelian resonances are palpable. Aristotle was the first to conceive of life as an activity of which there are distinct forms corresponding to different species, such that there could be such a thing as “Man’s Life” — a form of life specific to human beings.2 Aristotle characterized this human form of life as a life of reason, and he was the first to hold up such a life as a standard of value — a “target for living well” — with reference to which an individual could choose all of his goals and actions (EE I.2 1214b6–11). In these respects, Rand’s ethics is deeply Aristotelian, but her conception of the rational, human form of life differs markedly from Aristotle’s own, and there are related differences in the roles the standard of Man’s Life plays in their respective moral philosophies.

According to Aristotle, the ideal of Man’s Life is realized most fully by a philosopher engaged in contemplation of eternal verities — an activity that (in his view) is not meant to bear fruit in action. This same ideal is realized, though in a secondary way, by a political leader prudently deliberating for the sake of his city.3 The contemplator and the statesman both live lives of leisure, in which their time is released from the activities needed to produce the goods needed for survival, and so they are able to focus on living well as distinct from merely living. Thus, for Aristotle, a life of moneymaking (chrēmatistēs) fails to realize the ideal of Man’s Life, because it is something forced upon one by lack of resources (EN I.5 1096a5–6).4 By contrast, Rand wrote that “the words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”5 It is “the Producer” whom she regarded as “the man of reason” or “the thinker” (FTNI 21), and she characterized production as “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). Although she writes of producers in all professions and at all levels of ability, her ideal is epitomized by “[t]he great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors” (Fountainhead 710).

In the first two sections of this paper, I elucidate the content of the human form of life as understood by Aristotle and Rand, respectively. In my third section, I show how the differences in their view of Man’s Life reflect (and contribute to) different views of how a form of life can serve as an ethical standard. These differences, in turn, have implications for the extent to which their respective moral philosophies provide objective guidance rooted in knowledge of human nature, rather than merely systematizing existing mores or reading them into human nature. Accordingly, I close with a discussion of the objectivity of what each thinker regards as moral knowledge.

Aristotle’s Leisurely Ideal

The subject of Aristotle’s inquiry in ethics is “the human good” — that is, the ultimate end sought in and achievable by human action.6 By the end of Nicomachean Ethics I.7 (cf. EE II.1) he has identified this good with the excellent performance of the human function. For Aristotle, life is (in its fundamental sense) an activity (DA II.3), and what distinguishes human life from plant and animal life is that the activity centrally involves reason. Thus he thinks that the target at which we must aim to live well is a complete life of reason-involving activity performed excellently. To do something well or excellently is to do it in accordance with the appropriate virtues, and human virtues are those states from which reason functions well. Consequently, most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics (and Eudemian Ethics) is given over to examining virtue. Since Man’s Life is political — that is, lived in citystates — the treatise ends (EN X.9) with a transition into the Politics, which work provides further details about Man’s Life, taking care to distinguish its proper realization — “living well” — from mere “living” (Pol. 1257b41–8a1).

Aristotle’s teaching in Nicomachean Ethics can be briefly summarized as follows. Virtue comes in two broad types corresponding to two broad roles that reason plays in our lives: intellectual virtue perfects our thinking itself, whereas characterological virtue perfects our desires (and consequently our decisions) so that they accord with excellent reasoning.7

Thinking can be subdivided into two broad types: contemplation of truths that cannot be changed and deliberation about things we can effect. Contemplation is perfected by the sciences (epistēmai) — chiefly by sophia, which is the science by which we contemplate being qua being in light of its fundamental and universal causes. Deliberation is divisible into deliberation about how to produce specific types of effects (such as health or buildings) and general deliberation about how to act (including whether and when to produce the aforementioned effects). The first sort of deliberation is perfected by the various arts (technai), and the second, by phronēsis.8

The characterological virtues are stable dispositions to have desires or feelings that accord with the dictates of phronēsis. Each characterological virtue corresponds to a type of desire or feeling — for example, temperance, to the desire for bodily pleasures; mildness, to anger; wit, to the desire to joke and laugh. The virtue is a disposition to have the relevant desire or feeling in the right amount along any of the dimensions along which it might be possible to have it excessively or deficiently. Anger, for example, may be too intense or not intense enough, it may be directed at too many people or too few, and it may come on and pass too quickly or too slowly. Along each of these dimensions, this is a way of being angry that is intermediate between the errors of excess and deficiency, and this is the way that accords with phronēsis. The characterological virtue of mildness (the subject of EN IV.5) consists of being disposed to be angry in this intermediate way. Since desires or feelings motivate action, each characterological virtue motivates its possessor to act in a characteristic way, and one acquires a characterological virtue by being habituated into its characteristic way of acting.

Phronēsis and the characterological virtues form a set, as neither is possible (in its fully developed form) without the other. The exercise of these virtues is an instance of the functioning that is a human being’s chief good. Because of this, a life focused on exercising these abilities to their fullest qualifies as a happy or successful life. This is the political life — the life of a statesman. For it is in managing the affairs of a city that one has occasion to exercise one’s deliberative abilities on the largest scale with regard to the most important practical problems, and in doing this one faces many decisions that call for the exercise of characterological virtue. However, there is a still better life: the contemplative life, which is devoted to the development and exercise of sophia.

The contemplative life is better than the political because the activity on which it is focused is valuable only for its own sake, rather than being valued (even partially) for any contribution it makes to anything distinct from itself. By contrast, some of the value of a statesman’s deliberation derives from the fact that it enables contemplation.9 The productive activity that is perfected by the arts is primarily valued for its products, which are valuable (ultimately) because they enable activities of the other two types. Although there are indications (esp. Met. A.1) that Aristotle accords some intrinsic value to productive activity, and although there is a tradition inspired by Aristotle that extols the technai as virtues, it is clear from the Politics that Aristotle does not think that a life centered around productive work can be well lived. Indeed, he thinks that the performance of many of these activities is incompatible with living well (and so should disqualify one from citizenship).10 For some people to live well — to fully realize the human form of life — these activities must be relegated to their inferiors, who then participate in living well only by enabling it in their superiors.

What, then, is the human form of life that serves as an ethical standard for Aristotle? Schematically, it is an ordered set of activities in which one activity (contemplation) is intrinsically valuable and performed entirely for its own sake, while all the others exist at least in part to serve it. This subservience makes the subservient activities less valuable than the activity they serve. Some of the lesser activities may also have some intrinsic value (perhaps, as suggested by Lear [2004], due to their resemblance to the one best activity), but others are merely instrumental. The merely instrumental activities (at least many of them) diminish any life that includes them.

At best, such instrumental activities are an unwelcome distraction from the real business of human living; but Aristotle thinks that many of them also degrade the soul of anyone who performs these activities, and that this makes such people unfit for the leisurely activities of contemplation and statesmanlike deliberation.11 Such productive activities can thus have no part in the lives of those individuals who most fully realize the human form of life, so on a societal scale Man’s Life is characterized by a caste system in which some classes of people exist to serve others.12

This social hierarchy recapitulates an ontological hierarchy, at the top of which sits Aristotle’s God — a self-sufficient, supernatural mind that engages only in contemplation of itself. The movements that make up the natural world can be characterized as a side effect of this divine selfcontemplation. The natural world is no part of God’s aim, but realizing something like the self-sufficiency of God’s contemplative activity is the aim of the motions of the bodies within the natural world (from stars down to animals and plants). The human contemplator approximates this ideal most closely, becoming godlike in a way that makes it ambiguous whether he, in performing this activity, is part of the natural world at all.13

Thus, Aristotle suggests that the life of contemplation may be a divine form of life that is better than the human one. If so, then it may be that it is God’s Life, rather than Man’s, that is the standard of value — the target at which we should aim in all our actions. Aristotle raises this possibility in Nicomachean Ethics X.7, where he rejects the advice to “think human, since you are human” (1177b33) and urges readers to pursue the divine life of contemplation, which seems superior to human life. However, the conclusion of that chapter makes clear that he doesn’t accept the premise behind the advice that pursuing the life of contemplation (insofar as this is possible to a human being) amounts to directing one’s aim away from Man’s Life. Since a man’s mind is his best and most controlling element, it is what he is most of all. Thus, in aiming away from contemplation (which most gratifies the mind), a man would be aiming away from his own life.

Still, even if Aristotle can resolve the tension between a human being’s aiming at the divine and at the human, the role of divinity in Aristotle’s philosophy complicates the idea that Man’s Life is the standard of value in his ethics. For the very notion of the divine creates a standard that is distinct from Man’s Life. It is in accordance with this divine standard that Man’s Life is better than that of other animals and that, among human lives, a contemplator’s life is better than a statesman’s or a producer’s. To fully realize the standard of Man’s Life, as the best contemplators do, is to realize as fully as mortality permits this supernatural standard.

Rand’s Productive Ideal

For Rand, the activity that epitomizes reasoning is not a contemplation detached from meeting material needs; it is production: “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). By (almost all) contemporary lights, this view has an obvious advantage over Aristotle’s: if producing things required by human survival is an essential part of Man’s Life, rather than a distraction from it (or worse), then the ability of some of us to lead fully human lives needn’t depend on some exploited underclass’s doing this (intrinsically worthless, but instrumentally valuable) work for us. However, some might worry that, in centering human life on productive work, Rand is overfocusing on material needs and neglecting the higher values in life that make it worth living. In Aristotle’s terms, we might worry that by centering human life on “the problem of survival,” Rand is showing that what she prizes is merely living, rather than living well (Pol. I.9 1257b40). This is Aristotle’s criticism of those who overvalue moneymaking (chrematistikē). By his lights, such an attitude is slavish, and one might even imagine Aristotle viewing contemporary society as one from which freedom rather than slavery has been eliminated.14

This notion of universal slavery looms large in criticisms of capitalism (Rand’s ideal form of society) from all quarters.15 Critics of Rand have often pointed out the limitations of (what they see as) an ethics that makes all value merely instrumental on prolonging one’s life.16 Some readers have tried to avoid these implications by interpreting Rand along more Aristotelian lines.17

In explicating her view of Man’s Life as one of production, we should be mindful of how she might respond to such criticism. Toward this end, it will be helpful to consider how she developed her mature view (which is the target of such criticism) starting from a position that is closer to Aristotle’s.

In early notes and in her first novel, Rand draws a distinction that might be compared to Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. It is the distinction between living (as Rand’s protagonists do) and merely existing (as she thought most people did).18 Distinctions along these lines can be found in other literary authors, and considering a few quotes will help us see what is and is not distinctive to Rand:

• A contemporaneous English translation of an essay by Victor Hugo (1864a), whom Rand considered the “greatest novelist in world literature” (RM 147), reads: “It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives. To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one’s self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, commonsense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience.” (Hugo 1864b, 256)19

• Leo Tolstoy (2000, 239) wrote of people who exhibit “a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone.”

• Oscar Wilde (1891, 17), in extolling the individualism he thought would be possible only under socialism, wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except in the imaginative place of art. In action, we never have.”

• Jack London (2015, 6493) described many people as “unburied dead” and is reported to have declared: “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”20

• Francis Hodgson Burnet (1907) described the protagonist of her novel The Shuttle as having “a genius for living, for being vital”: “Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less” (112, cf. 60). “She’s Life itself! … What a thing it is for a man or woman to be Life — instead of a mass of tissue and muscle and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!” (274).

• Sinclair Lewis (1920, 265), who was Rand’s favorite contemporary writer in the 1930s (cf. Mayhew 2007b, 219–20), wrote of people who exhibit “the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking.”

There are differences between the views expressed in these passages, but in all of them “living” (or being “alive”) is associated with a spiritual quality that many (perhaps most) people lack. The people who aren’t alive engage in metabolism and move about in the world eating and working to satisfy their physiological needs, but their existence lacks purpose and is devoid of passion.

In contrast to such people, consider what Kira Argounova, the heroine of Rand’s We the Living, says about being alive: “What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself?” (WTL36 496, cf. WTL 385).21 What Kira has wanted since childhood was to build aluminum bridges (WTL36 43, WTL 35). What she seeks out of life is a specific productive career, but in Rand’s descriptions of this ambition, we read nothing about the purpose the bridges are to serve or why she thinks building them out of aluminum will serve this purpose; much less do we hear about any money she hopes to make from the bridges. What attracts Kira to building is not any survival need that she thinks her bridges will serve (for herself or for others), nor is it a protestant (or proletarian) ethic that valorizes work as such. We’re told that Kira “had chosen a future of the hardest work,” despite her “aristocratic … conviction that labor and effort were ignoble” (WTL36 42–43, cf. WTL 34). What attracts her is a spiritual quality in her chosen work. It is the audacity of shaping the physical world on a grand scale — of bending it to her will. What Kira admires and seeks to realize in her own life is the self-assertiveness of a unique individual’s creating something on a grand scale. We can see this same attitude in Rand’s admiring description of Petrograd: “Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An inexorable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city” (WTL36 285, cf. WTL 223).

Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is also a builder. Here is what he says, early in the novel, about why he chose this career: “It’s because I’ve never believed in God… . Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them” (Fountainhead 38–39). It is certainly not for the sake of the clients that Roark wants to build: he tells us early in the novel that he intends to have clients in order to build, rather than the reverse (14). He later describes “the meaning of life” as “the material the earth offers you and what you make of it,” illustrating his point by bending a tree branch into an arc and saying, “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing” (577).

Although the careers that Rand extols in her early writing (through The Fountainhead) do meet survival needs, she focuses not on solving the problem of survival but on the spiritual-cum-physical achievement of imposing one’s vision on the world. This, for the early Rand, is what Man’s Life is about. To use a distinction employed by Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged, we might say that the early Rand saw Man’s Life as a life of living up to “the best within us” rather than a life devoted to such mundane matters as “business and earning a living” (Atlas 6).22 The mundane matters are for the sake of the higher, spiritual ones.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, this way of thinking is subverted. In the novel’s denouement, Eddie comes to realize that “business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible — that is the best within us” (1166). Rand’s point here is not that Kira’s and Roark’s priorities in her earlier novels were inverted. Her point is, rather, that it is essential to the spiritual activity she extolled in those earlier works that this activity is the ultimate source of the material values on which human survival directly depends. Recognizing that the spiritual activity that Kira called “living” is self-sustaining enables us to live (and to love our lives) more fully and consistently.

We can see some germs of this perspective, in Rand’s earlier work and in some of the other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors quoted above. These authors often portray the spiritual qualities associated with living (as opposed to merely existing) as making characters effective, and this efficacy extends to such productive enterprises as the factory by which Jean Valjean reinvigorates the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Betty Vanderpole’s rebuilding of the Stornham Court estate in Burnett’s The Shuttle, and Martin Edin’s literary career in London’s eponymous novel. Burnett is explicit about the connection between Betty’s “genius for living” and literal survival, for she writes of this genius keeping her alive and contrasts this with being “kept alive by others.”

The revitalizations of Montreuil-sur-Mer and Stornham Court are instances of bourgeois or upwardly mobile newcomers supplanting the practices of an exhausted aristocracy, and so these episodes could be seen to represent a respect in which the emerging capitalist social system is more vital than the feudal system it was supplanting. Socialist authors, such as Wilde and London, looked forward to the greater material prosperity that they imagined would result once the abolition of private property (somehow) enabled more widespread vitality. We can see this same motivation in Andrei Tagonov and Stepan Timoshenko, the most admirable Communist characters in Rand’s We the Living. These men are among the living, and they “made a revolution” in order “to raise men to our own level.”23 In time Tagonov and Timoshenko realize that the Soviet regime they have made possible sacrifices the living for the sake of those who merely exist and that the result is both spiritual desolation and grinding poverty. This point is made also in Rand’s Anthem (published between We the Living and The Fountainhead), which depicts a collectivistic society of the future that, because of such sacrifices, has regressed to a pre-industrial state of existence in which hardly anyone lives past middle age.

Howard Roark articulates the point in his courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. He attributes the spiritual activity that is characteristic of Rand’s heroes to the faculty of reason, and he emphasizes reason’s role in both Man’s “glory” and his survival:

His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power — that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons — a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind. (Fountainhead 678–79)

The elevated way of life celebrated in Rand’s early fiction is one that she views both as the proper human form of life and as quite different from how people typically lead their lives. In these respects, her view is like Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. But Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life differs from Aristotle’s in two important respects. The first is that Rand emphasized individuality and personal values in a way that Aristotle did not (but nineteenth-century literary authors did). The second is that the life Rand idealized involves such paradigmatically productive activities as building bridges, skyscrapers, and (in Anthem) light bulbs.

From Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life, it is a comparatively small step (especially after the industrial revolution) to observe that the work of creative geniuses plays an outsized role in human survival. This takes us to The Fountainhead’s view of the great creators. It is a further step from here to grasp that the same spiritual activity (though in different forms and at different scales) makes possible all of the actions by which human beings produce the (spiritual and physical) values on which human survival depends. It is a still further step to grasp that this fact about the spiritual activity with which Kira identified living is essential to this activity. This last step, which is unique to Rand, marks a fundamental development in the understanding of Man’s Life. Absent this step, “Man’s Life” is understood as a certain, elevated lifestyle — a specific way of spending one’s time — to which human nature suits us. Rand’s insight upgrades it into a genuine conception of a life.

Rand characterizes life as “a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action” (VOS 16, cf. Aristotle, DA 416b17 on the power of nutrition). For different living species to have different forms of life is for them to sustain themselves by different processes of self-generated action. The human process — the only process by which even a human being’s crudest physiological needs can be met — is a rational process. Rational activity is not just a distinguishing feature of human life by dint of which we live well, as opposed to merely living; rather, reason (or “man’s mind”) is man’s “basic tool of survival” (Atlas 1011).

This is true even in the most primitive hunter-gatherer conditions (which Roark alludes to in his speech). But, so long as human beings lived a primarily agricultural and low-tech form of existence, it would have been difficult to appreciate the full scope of reason’s role in human survival. Aristotle, of course, acknowledges that reason (via the technai) plays a significant role in the process of human survival, but he thinks that all the relevant technai were discovered and perfected (or nearly perfected) long ago, and their continued exercise doesn’t much impress him.24

The most intense and impressive activities of reason of which Aristotle was aware (such as those involved in axiomatizing geometry or in identifying causes of astronomical phenomena) played no obvious role in human survival, so it is not surprising that he regarded such exercises of rationality as ends-in-themselves that make no contribution to the business of living. From Rand’s perspective, however, Aristotle’s view represents an intense valuing of the mind coupled with an impoverished understanding of what she called “the role of the mind in man’s existence” (FTNI 97, RM 72). This last is what she described as the theme of Atlas Shrugged.

Before delving deeper into Atlas, it’s worth commenting on the allusion to Aristotle in the passage from Roark’s speech. Roark describes the creator’s mind as “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover.” Roark’s creators are like the Aristotelian Prime Mover in at least two respects. First, they are first causes, as opposed to things that act only because they are moved by others. The primary contrast here is to the people Roark calls “second-handers” (Fountainhead 633–36) — those whose lives are animated only as the aftereffects of the thinking of others. In the years after The Fountainhead, Rand would further articulate her view of human thought as a first cause into a theory of free will that is centered on a primary choice to engage or disengage one’s mind.25

The second respect in which Roark’s creators are like Aristotle’s Prime Mover is that they engage in their activity for its own sake, rather than for the sake of an end beyond itself, and (at least many of) the positive effects of their activities on others form no part of their motivation. However, unlike the purely contemplative activity of the Aristotelian Prime Mover, the Roarkian Creators’ activities are productive and so are deeply engaged with the natural (and, in some cases, social) world.26

The work Roark regards as an end-in-itself isn’t limited to contemplating architectural principles, or even to designing buildings in his head or on paper. He loves to build. This love certainly includes the products of the building; for it is essential to the activity (and to Roark’s love of it) that it produces buildings that serve a purpose.27 Nevertheless, Roark doesn’t build for the mere sake of the buildings’ existing (or their purpose’s getting served), but for the sake of building them. If he found that there were already plenty of buildings of the sort he liked in the world (apart from his action), rather than being fulfilled he would look for something else to create. What he wants isn’t simply the world to be shaped a certain way; he wants to shape it.

As the example of Roark illustrates, valuing a productive activity stands in a subtle relation to valuing its product. For the activity to be productive it must be aimed at the product, and the activity’s value depends on the product’s actually serving a survival need. But what one values in valuing the product is not the (generic) fulfillment of that need, but the product itself. And part of valuing a product as such is regarding it as something produced (whether by oneself or by someone else). Loving a productive activity is not just loving either a need’s getting met or the product by which it gets met; it is valuing the activity of meeting the need by creating the product. The need is an essential part of the context that gives rise to the activity, but the need’s satisfaction is not that for the sake of which the activity is loved.

If Rand’s ethics is correct, then all proper human activities play a role in fulfilling biological needs, and this is essential to these activities’ being proper. Nevertheless, it is possible for someone to love such an activity without attending to the need that gives rise to it (as Kira does in the case of engineering), or without even being aware of this need. Hidden in the remains of a railroad tunnel from a collapsed and forgotten industrial civilization, the hero of Anthem begins conducting scientific experiments with no purpose in mind beyond satisfying his curiosity. It is only after he has reinvented the light bulb that he comes to realize that the scientific research he loves is life-sustaining as well as spiritually rewarding, and it is later still that he comes to see working to sustain one’s life as noble.28 Arguably, Aristotle was in a similar epistemic position when he regarded contemplation as an end-in-itself. Like the hero of Anthem, he loved seeking causes, which he saw as epitomizing the activity of reason, but he misunderstood the role of such reasoning in human life as a whole.

This brings us to Atlas Shrugged’s theme of the “role of reason in man’s existence.” As I’ve written elsewhere (Salmieri 2009b), this theme can be divided into two broad aspects: reason as the productive faculty and reason as the valuing faculty. As the productive faculty, reason is the source of material values on which human life depends. The novel illustrates reason’s role (through technology) in the production of food, shelter, and other necessities of survival. It illustrates the grand scale of the reason-guided productive activity that makes possible the comparatively long, safe, and healthy lives that modern residents of first world countries take for granted. And it illustrates the intensity of the reasoning involved in the relevant productive achievements. Reason is also the valuing faculty, in that it is responsible for the spiritual activities that Rand extolled in her earlier writing. It is by reason that (as Kira put it) we “know how to want,” and this knowing is the source of personal commitments to values and of the emotional intensity that the early Rand viewed as essential to living (as distinct from merely existing).

Atlas treats these two aspects of reason’s functioning as a systematic whole. The activity that the heroes love and engage in as an end-in-itself is one of rationally conceiving life-supporting values and then bringing these values into existence through productive action. This activity is portrayed as the core activity of human life. The novel illustrates how values of many sorts (romantic love, sex, abstract science, philosophy, art, wealth, friendship) each play a role in this process, and it shows the corrupted and destructive form these values take when pursued in ways that drop this context. Thus, for the mature Rand to say that man is the “rational animal” (ITOE 44) is to say that the very process by which human beings live is essentially rational.

The components of this life stand in various means-end relations, as when one cooks a meal in order to eat it, but these relations are not all unidirectional (as the Aristotelian means-end relation seems to be), and so the value of a means is not always derived from and lesser than the value of the end. One cooks in order to eat, but one eats in order to have energy to perform activities of which cooking is one. Living, which is the ultimate end, is not some atomic activity to which all one’s other activities are mere means. Rather the end — one’s life — is a complex, self-sustaining activity, composed of many parts (some more central, others peripheral).

Rand’s conception of one’s life as one’s ultimate value should not be confused with the idea of an “inclusive end” that figures in the secondary literature on Aristotle’s ethics.29 An inclusive end is one that subsumes (some of) the other values that are pursued for its sake rather than merely resulting causally from them. In some versions of this view, the other values are made more valuable by being constituents of the inclusive end, but as the idea is usually understood, each of the values subsumed in the inclusive end has some intrinsic value apart from its effects and from its participation in a larger whole. The inclusive end is valuable because it combines things that are valuable in themselves, and (perhaps) because the combination enhances its constituents in such a manner as to make the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts.

For Rand, by contrast, there are no intrinsic values, and the value of each component of a life depends entirely on its effects and on its relation to the whole life.30 This is true for life in general (e.g., for a plant’s life or an animal’s). In the human case, there’s an added component. Since it is reason that integrates the pursuit of these many values into a self-sustaining life, each value’s status as a value depends on the valuer’s knowing how to achieve and utilize the value in a way that serves his life as a whole. Of course, this knowledge can be more or less extensive and more or less explicit. We will see in the next two sections how Rand thinks moral philosophy gives us explicit abstract knowledge of how to integrate values into a human life, and how Aristotle’s ethics relates to hers on this count.

Abstract Standards and Personal Purposes

Because Aristotle’s conception of Man’s Life includes practicing one of two specific occupations (that of a philosopher or that of a statesman), it strikes contemporary readers as unduly narrow and insensitive to the deeply personal factors that incline different people to different careers. We now take it for granted that there is a wide range of possible and equally valuable careers, and that a person’s choice between them will depend on personal preferences or other individuating factors.

Aristotle isn’t blind to the fact that ethical principles need to be applied to individuals in a way that is tailored to their differing features and circumstances — indeed this is something he stresses. But there is a difference between tailoring the same suit differently for different individuals and designing a different suit for each. This point should be familiar from The Fountainhead: Keating adapts old designs to new sites (which requires a modicum of intelligence), whereas Roark creates a new design for each building (always following the same abstract architectural principles). There is an emphasis on the value of creativity, individuality, and the personal in Rand’s work (and in modernity generally) that is missing (or at least muted) in Aristotle. We can see this in the somewhat differing roles that (what amounts to) the idea of a standard of value plays in the work of the two philosophers.

Although I suggest Aristotle and Rand both treat Man’s Life as a standard of moral value, the terms “standard of value” and “morality” are not found in Aristotle, so it is worth saying a bit about how Rand uses them and about the corresponding terminology in Aristotle. Rand defines morality as “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions — the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life” (VOS 13). And she defines a “standard” as “an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose” (27). So, when she speaks of the standard of value of a morality, she means an abstract principle by which one can guide one’s life as a whole by selecting specific goals and specific means to them.

Aristotle formulates what amounts to this same idea of a comprehensive guiding principle for life via the metaphor of a target: “Everyone who is able to live according to his own choice should set up some target for living well (whether it’s honor or reputation or wealth or education) looking to which he will take all of his actions; since not having one’s life arranged toward some end is a sign of great folly. So, first of all, we must define for ourselves without haste or carelessness (i) those things in which living well consists and (ii) those things without which living well is impossible for human beings” (Aristotle, EE I.2 1214b6–14).31 The idea of a “target for living well” is explained by the comment that it is something the person can “look to” in taking all of his actions and, thereby, arrange his life toward an end. Aristotle’s advice isn’t simply that everyone who can should erect some such target; for the context makes clear that he thinks there is a correct target, which we can identify by attending to two questions: (i) In what things does living well consist? (ii) What (other) things are prerequisites for a human being’s living well? The four possible targets Aristotle suggests (“honor, reputation, wealth, or education”) are candidate answers (which Aristotle goes on to reject) for the first of these questions.32 The candidates’ function in the passage is to concretize the idea of a target around which a life could be organized. Each target is abstract enough to serve as a standard of value (in Rand’s sense) — a guide by which a person could select his more specific goals and values. And each leads to a distinctive and recognizable type of life. Having introduced the idea of a target (or standard of value), Aristotle immediately shifts to the task of identifying the correct target.

The passage we have been discussing comes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, but we find the target metaphor also in the Nicomachean Ethics. There it is introduced after Aristotle discusses the goods of various endeavors and the respects in which one good can be subordinate to another. This suggests to him the idea of a “chief good,” which is desired for its own sake and for the sake of which we do everything we do. If there is such a good, Aristotle writes, knowledge of it will make us “like archers with a target to aim at, more likely to hit on what is right” (EN 1094a22–24). Later, he recapitulates that “there is a target to which the man who has reason looks and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly” (1138b22–23).

I take it that, for Aristotle, the target and the ultimate good are the same in one respect but distinct in another. To use an Aristotelian turn of phrase, they are the same in number, but their being is not the same. There is a certain item — a certain activity (as we’ll see) — that is the chief good for human beings, and this item is the human good, whether or not anyone recognizes it as such. Moreover, this activity is the good of each particular human being, whether or not that human being recognizes this. But it is only when I recognize this item as my good that it becomes a target for me — something I can use to consciously guide my action. And the good’s status as a target makes it easier for me to attain it.

Does Rand share this view of the relation between the ultimate value and the target? She writes: “An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means — and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil” (VOS 17).

Here the ultimate value is said to set the standard of value rather than to be that standard, but the same thing — an organism’s life — is placed in both roles. We saw earlier that Rand distinguishes between a standard and a purpose; the former is an abstraction that serves as a guide to the achievement of the latter, which is a concrete. She applies this point to the human case as follows: “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man — in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life” (VOS 27).

The point that a standard is abstract — whereas a purpose is concrete — presumably applies in the case of nonhuman organisms as well. Lassie’s life will be her ultimate value; and because Lassie is a dog, Dog’s Life will be the standard with reference to which it can be determined what furthers or threatens Lassie’s life.33 Of course, Lassie herself will not consciously appeal to this abstract standard when evaluating things, but her owner or veterinarian may make decisions for her with this standard in view. Moreover, an account of the reason Lassie pursues the various items she does would appeal to the standard of Dog’s Life. For example, an explanation of why she’s so protective of Timmy would appeal to the fact that a dog is a domesticated pack animal that lives by serving its human master. Unbeknownst to Lassie, this fact about Dog’s Life (when combined with facts about Lassie’s circumstances) explains her valuing of Timmy. This distinction between standard and purpose is more important in the case of human beings precisely because, unlike dogs, we can have an abstract understanding of our form of life and use this understanding to select our personal values. Moreover, the process of applying the abstract standard to one’s own concrete case is an important instance of the reasoning that is the distinguishing feature of human life.

The target Aristotle speaks of in the first books of the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics is presumably meant to be the relatively abstract account he’s providing in those works. This account is the same for a beginner in gymnastics and for Milo the wrestler (to repurpose Aristotle’s example from EN 1106a33), even though the specific actions that each one will need to take to hit this target will be different. Central to Aristotle’s conception of practical virtue is the ability to reason well about particular cases. This reasoning involves a nuanced recognition of how relevant abstract considerations pertaining to the standard apply to an individual case, in light of the many factors that differentiate the individual and his circumstances from those of others.

For Rand, there is an additional respect in which the distinction between the abstract standard and the concrete purpose matters: part of reason’s role in life is choosing one’s purposes — including one’s overarching purpose in life. This is not simply a matter of recognizing how some predetermined, universal end can best be achieved given one’s distinctive features and circumstances. Rather, it is a matter of conceiving of a new, distinctive end for oneself. “You set the goal and the meaning; the field of choice and possibilities is immense; the only necessity involved is that you use the material as it is and your tool (reason) as it is — that you understand them for what they are before you choose or achieve a purpose” (Papers 032_11B_002_060 / Journals 294).

Once one recognizes all the pertinent facts, including those that give rise to the need for a moral standard and all the particular facts about oneself and one’s circumstances, there are inexhaustibly many possible lives one can choose as one’s purpose. Each of these purposes constitutes a concrete instance of the human form of life that must be conceived with reference both to the abstract standard (and the facts that give rise to it) and to the differentiating features of oneself and one’s circumstances. This conceiving is not merely a matter of adapting an existing form to a new concrete situation, it’s a new creative act.

An analogy may be instructive here. Think of a poet composing a sonnet for the wedding of two friends. In doing so, he makes reference both to the abstract form of a sonnet and to the many specific details of the couple and the occasion. But there are many possible poems that are instances of the sonnet form and that would be suitable to recite at this wedding. The poet’s task is not to pick out the most suitable poem from this infinite set (as if the infinity of potential poems already existed somewhere to be selected from).34 Rather, his task is to compose a sonnet for the occasion. The sonnet is a new creation of the poet. And, even though a sonnet is a fairly rigid form, think of how different the poet’s activity is from simply plugging concretes about the couple into some preset formula — like filling out a Mad Lib. Most notably, the poem will need to have a theme and a central idea for how to express this theme in the sonnet form.35 But neither the theme nor the central idea is established by the sonnet form, by the occasion of the wedding, or by any facts about the couple. All of these factors will be relevant to the poet’s choice of theme and central idea — and to all the other choices involved in executing the central idea — but the choices themselves involve new acts of creative reasoning on the poet’s part. Composition consists largely in such acts of creative reasoning. And it is in the nature of such acts that, no matter how well the poet does his job, it would be possible for someone to do it equally well by composing a wholly different sonnet (perhaps with a wholly different theme). It is this sort of creative reasoning that, in Rand’s view, is involved in setting the core purposes that shape one’s life and thereby composing an ultimate value (or purpose) for oneself. In this process moral principles (including the standard of Man’s Life) play something like the role of principles of literary composition.

I don’t know that Aristotle would disagree with this point. Even within the contemplative life, there must be many choices about which things to study in which ways. How does one divide one’s time between studying mathematics and the natural world? In one’s study of nature, does one focus more on animals (as Aristotle did) or on plants (as did Theophrastus)? Even if different options may be better for different people with different talents or circumstances, it’s doubtful that such considerations would mandate a single best syllabus for any individual’s contemplative career. Likewise, there are presumably different roles a statesman could play in his city, and it may be that, even given a particular set of facts about his talents and circumstances, there are multiple political careers for him to choose among. However, although Aristotle’s view is consistent with there being such scope for personal choice and may even imply it, this is not something he calls attention to, and he does not valorize the making of such choices as an exercise of reason.

To return to the example of the wedding sonnet, if we value the sonnet, we do not value it simply as a functional item that serves its purpose in the wedding ceremony (to whatever extent it does). Rather, we also value it as the work of a specific artist, bearing the mark of his specific personality and sensibility. Likewise, when Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged loves Taggart Transcontinental and John Galt (the two concrete values that are central to her life), she loves them not merely as values that can constitute and sustain a human life, but as her specific chosen ends. There is an individualistic element here that we might call Romantic, insofar as it stems from an emphasis on the choices of individuals reflecting the details of their souls.

This individualistic, Romantic perspective is largely absent from Aristotle. He comes nearest to it when he points out that poets love their own works (and parents, their own children) more than they do other people’s, because they are their own creations.36 But there is something impersonal — and unromantic — in his accounts of love and of literary creation. Although, as Robert Mayhew argues in chapter 13 of this volume, Aristotle’s theory of literary creation stresses some of the methods of literary integration that would later be essential to the Romantic movement in literature, it lacks the emphasis on the author’s distinctive personal values that is also characteristic of this school.37 Likewise Aristotle’s account of love (discussed by Allan Gotthelf in chapter 14 of this volume) stresses the importance of character and virtue to the highest forms of love, but he says comparatively little about the sorts of individualizing features that make one person love a particular other person as distinct from others who may share his virtues — the sorts of features that Rand captures in her concept of a “sense of life.”38

Rand’s distinction between a standard and a purpose brings out the abstractness of the former and the concreteness of the latter. The relation of the abstract standard to the concrete purpose isn’t one of tailoring the former to the latter but, rather, of using the former as a guide in one’s creation of the latter. This distinction helps us think in a new way about what we might call paradigmatic instances of the standard — individuals that fulfill it perfectly and dramatically. Aristotle’s God and the people whom Rand (borrowing Aristotelian language) calls “Prime Movers” are examples of such paradigmatic instances of Aristotle’s and Rand’s respective moral standards — of Man’s Life.39

The more we think of contemplation (or whatever one holds as the highest activity) as a single concrete activity that admits of some variation (such that it can be tailored to individual cases), the more natural it is to identify this standard with an individual who embodies it most fully. If one does this, one’s standard becomes in effect likeness to this individual. Aristotle’s cosmology and ethics are both plausibly interpreted along these lines. The stars revolve in order to be like God, and the philosopher contemplates for the same reason. We can describe this as seeking to be like God — or as seeking to realize in oneself the abstraction of which God is the fullest embodiment. But insofar as the standard is such that there is a single way to embody it most fully, these two descriptions amount to the same thing. By contrast, when a standard is understood as an abstract principle that exists for the sake of guiding us in the achievement of different concrete purposes, there cannot be any single, unique paradigm instance of the standard with which it can be identified in the way that the activity of contemplation can be identified with Aristotle’s God.

John Galt is Rand’s fullest literary embodiment of her moral standard, and there is a sense in which anyone attempting to live up to this standard is striving to be like Galt. Indeed, Galt serves as an inspiration to the other heroes in Atlas Shrugged, and Rand writes of the ways in which literary heroes can serve such a role.40 However, it is in the nature of Rand’s standard that Galt’s life is just one of a potentially infinite number of different lives that could fulfill the standard perfectly — lives that involve wholly different careers, interests, friends, priorities, and so on, all falling equally under such abstractions as “rationality,” “productiveness,” and “pride.” Such lives are not variations on any single theme, any more than are all Romantic piano concertos or all buildings designed in accordance with Roark’s principles. It is essential to a building’s perfectly realizing these principles that it is not just numerically unique but is integrated around a distinct idea conceived to fulfill its individual purpose in its individual setting. In the same way, Galt’s individuality is essential to his realizing Rand’s ideal. One seeks to be like Galt (or to build like Roark or to compose like Tchaikovsky) not by seeking to be concretely like him but by realizing in a new and distinctive way the same abstractions that he epitomizes.41

For Rand, paradigmatic concretes play a heuristic role in helping one to hold and implement a standard, rather than themselves serving as standards to which other things approximate. We can see this in her brief discussion of the “psycho-epistemological function of a personified (concretized) human ideal”:

Observe that every religion has a mythology — a dramatized concretization of its moral code embodied in the figures of men who are its ultimate product…. This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.

Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: “What would Roark do in this situation?” — and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do — and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him. (“Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM 10, emphasis added)

The concretized ideal is a model created by the artist to dramatically embody abstract principles. And its proper function is to help us to isolate and identify these principles, rather than to serve as a standard directly. We live well, not to the extent that we approximate to being Roark but to the extent that we, like Roark, act with such virtues as independence and integrity.42

The Objectivity of the Moral Code

Part of the appeal of the idea of a distinctively human form of life as a standard for ethics is that it purports to provide an objective standard for morality. We are a certain species with a certain nature that fits us to live in a certain way. Moral principles can be derived from an understanding of this nature and its implications, rather than being mere systematizations of our (personal or societal) preferences or prejudices. I take it that the promise of some sort of objective grounding for ethics accounts for much of the appeal of works such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, with its suggestion that moral goodness and badness are akin to features that make members of other species fit or unfit to carry on the ways of life of their species.43

I indicated earlier how the most abhorrent features of Aristotle’s ethics — his endorsement of slavery and attitude toward productive work — stem from his distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values, and I showed how Rand’s alternative view of value underwrites a view in which a nonexploitative harmony of interests is possible between people (and within each individual). Now I want to raise a related, methodological question. Is there anything in Aristotle’s approach to ethics that provides a ground on which he could and should have rejected the exploitative features of the classical Greek way of life that we now regard as evil? More generally, does an Aristotelian approach to ethics put us in a position to reflect critically on the way of life into which we have been acculturated?

Of course, we cannot expect that Aristotle could have seen everything that we now recognize as wrong with every classical Greek practice or institution. Nor should we expect it to be easy for us to identify any immoral aspects of current mores that may be obvious to future generations. However, part of the job of moral philosophy is to equip us to differentiate the good from the parochial — to determine what is wrong as well as what is right about the ways of life to which we’re accustomed and to evaluate challenges to this way of life once they’ve been suggested. The idea of a human function or form of life that can serve as a moral standard brings with it a promise of objectivity. It suggests that the way of life the Aristotelian advocates is grounded in nature rather than in the customs or prejudices of an individual or a society. If the human form of life is our standard of value, then, once we encounter radical suggestions such as that slavery may be wrong or that moneylending may not be, we should be able to use the standard to settle the matter. No doubt, it may take skill or nuance to apply the standard correctly, but it ought to be possible to do it, and it ought to be possible to recognize cases in which it has been done. Otherwise, the standard is nothing more than a codification of our preexisting moral attitudes — including any relevant prejudices we may have.

The abhorrent and parochial features of Aristotle’s own view of Man’s Life should make us sensitive to the possibility of simply reading into nature our own prejudices, whatever they may be. The connection between Man’s Life and survival in Rand’s ethics is meant to give us a means to ensure that no mere prejudices get included as elements of Man’s Life.

When Rand describes “Man’s Life” as the standard of value, this phrase is not meant to name some preferred lifestyle that she counts as “living well” for a man and that she venerates over other ways in which men might equally well sustain themselves. Rather, she means “man’s survival qua man” — that is, “the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan — in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice” (VOS 26). Each of the moral values and virtues that she identifies as components of “Man’s Life” are supposed to play a causal role in the process by which a human being survives across a human lifespan. This is not to say that a person would necessarily (or even probably) die young without it. There are all sorts of ways in which organisms can subsist despite dysfunctions. But a trait is not a dysfunction at all unless it drains or distracts from the process by which the organism survives. Likewise, any alleged immorality is not genuinely immoral unless it is a drain or distraction from the process by which a human being survives, and conversely nothing is genuinely moral unless it makes some contribution to this process. Rand’s morality is meant to identify in abstract and essentialized terms the portions of that process that are subject to choice. (Dysfunctions that aren’t due to choice are unhealthy — or otherwise bad — without being immoral.)

The idea of an ethical standard based on Man’s Life cannot provide objectivity if our conception of that form of life derives the whole of its content from the habits and mores that happen to be dominant in our milieu. This is, in effect, how Rand viewed Aristotle’s standard: “The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise” (VOS 14). Aristotle did consider — at least to a certain extent — why a phronimos acts as he does. The chapters on the characterological virtues, for example, describe some of the considerations relevant to particular virtues. But Rand is right that Aristotle didn’t think these questions admit of exact and abstract answers.

In any case, the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists who extol phronēsis do not prize any of the specific considerations from which Aristotle says the phronimos reasons. What these ethicists stress (and often exaggerate) is the quasi-perceptual character of phronēsis itself.44 Thus they reference the phronimos as the standard of what to do, and the standard (such as it is) to which Aristotle himself appeals is neglected. Some interpreters and revivers of Aristotelian ethics go so far as to deny that there is any abstract standard there.45

If the idea of a human form of life as a standard of value is to do any real work, it needs to derive at least some of its content from a broadly biological understanding of what a form-of-life is, in general, and what the human form is, in particular. However, it would also be a mistake to read off ethics in too facile a manner from an antecedent understanding of biology. Some worry that the attempt to ground morality in biological functions opens up the possibility that traits such as violence and deception could turn out to be virtues.46 And we should not forget that forms of nonprocreative sex have often been deemed vicious on the grounds that they involve uses of our sexual organs that are counter to what are supposed to be their natural biological purposes. If we think such conclusions are unwarranted, we must be on guard against the possibility of erring in our attempts to derive ethical content from our understanding of human biology.

If we are concerned about objectivity, we can neither prejudicially valorize as parts of Man’s Life whatever moral views we happen to hold, nor can we blithely infer moral content from biology while remaining (as Aristotle puts it) “inexperienced in the actions of life” (EN 1095a3). There is a third alternative. If there is a human form of life, if moral goodness consists in realizing it (or approximating to it), and if we are decent people who know some significant moral truths on the basis of our inarticulate experience (or because of our upbringing), then we ought to be able to draw on an independent understanding of our natures as members of the human species to understand why the actions or traits that we correctly regard as morally good form part of the human form of life (whereas their contraries do not).

The fact that the human form of life is essentially rational is a rudimentary biological fact graspable without specialized study — analogous to the fact that falcons and other birds of prey live lives of predation, whereas deer lead lives of grazing and fleeing. Rand’s ethics, which is intended as an articulation the contents of Man’s Life, traces out the consequences of this and related facts. These consequences are not meant to be deduced from biological facts ab initio. Just as, in an Aristotelian science, many of the facts to be demonstrated are already known on the basis of experience, so too in ethics, decent and experienced people may already possess and live by moral knowledge, before they come to understand the basis of this knowledge in the requirements of Man’s Life. Thus, one of the minor heroes of Atlas Shrugged says that the character who taught him this moral code has “merely named what I had lived by, what every man lives by — at and to the extent of such time as he doesn’t spend destroying himself” (Atlas 447).

The moral code (or explicit moral theory) formulates the relevant truths explicitly and identifies them as parts of the human survival process. In this way it helps an individual who already knew and lived by some of these truths in an inarticulate manner to integrate his pursuits into a self-sustaining whole (a life). The process of integration is error correcting in that conflicts among one’s values (including between one’s concrete values and one’s moral code) are evidence that some of the values (or moral beliefs) are mistaken and must be revised.47

What are these ethical facts that form part of Rand’s moral theory but can initially be grasped and applied experientially? One is the value of the spiritual qualities (such as passion, independence, and creativity) that the early Rand extolled. Another is the recognition that the values on which one’s life depends need to be produced by reason-directed human effort so that (if one is not to be a parasite, which is self-defeating in innumerable ways) one must live productively. Other parts of Rand’s code include the virtue of honesty (which she conceptualizes as the recognition that the unreal is unreal and can have no value), the virtue of independence (the recognition that thinking is not an activity one person can perform for another), the virtue of justice (the recognition that one must be objective in assessing the characters of others and that one must treat them accordingly), and the “trader principle” (which states that one must deal with others only voluntarily, to mutual benefit by mutual consent, rather than treating people as prey or as objects of charity). The validation of these virtues is too large a topic to take up here.48 I mention them just to give a sense of the sort of content included in the moral code and to indicate the role Rand thinks it plays in human life.

Notice that these virtues are more abstract and more absolute than the content of Aristotelian ethics. Earlier I noted that, for Rand, an individual must compose his life using the standard of Man’s Life as an abstract guide in the process; the content of Rand’s ethics can be seen as principles of composition for a life analogous to principles of literary composition. The moral principles specify the broad values that a human life requires, and the broad sorts of actions by which those values can be pursued in a coherent and self-sustaining manner.

The putatively biological fact about human beings that neo-Aristotelian ethicists most often appeal to is that man is a social animal. I take it that the point of describing man as a social animal and of comparing human beings in this respect to bees, ants, and herd animals (rather than simply just pointing out that human beings live in societies) is to draw on biology in something like the way I recommended earlier. We don’t simply catalogue the ways people conduct their lives and claim that this constitutes a human way of life, which is our function. Instead, we recognize our form of life as one that is rooted in our nature and that can be illuminated by comparisons to the lives of animals with relevantly similar natures.

But such comparisons with other animals that live in groups cannot be illuminating unless they are drawn with due attention to the characteristics that differentiate us from all other animals. The essence of humanity — our fundamental distinguishing characteristic — is rationality, and rationality makes a profound difference in every aspect of life that we engage in consciously (as opposed to the physiological activities of what Aristotle calls the nutritive soul). We should, therefore, expect it to make a profound difference in the nature of our sociality. This is Rand’s view, at any rate. “Man,” one of her protagonists says, “is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach” (Atlas 747). The “looters” in question are those who think that we should live in a collectivistic, rather than an individualistic, society. In a later essay, she elaborates on how the faculty of reason (here described as “a conceptual consciousness”) requires a distinctive form of social existence:

Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man’s nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life — but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered). (“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL 2:2, 127)

The idea that rationality makes human beings very different from other animals, even with respect to functions or faculties that we share with them at a generic level, brings me to a point mentioned earlier in connection with the worry about inferring ethical conclusions from (putatively) biological knowledge about a human function. Sexuality is one area in which many such inferences have been drawn that may strike us as misguided. It is obvious that reproduction is the — or at least a — “natural” function of our sex organs, and this has sometimes been thought to justify condemnations of various nonreproductive forms of sex as unnatural and (therefore) improper. But human beings are essentially rational animals, and part of reason’s role in human life is to enable each human being to compose for himself an individual life made up of specific values and practices that cohere into a self-sustaining whole. As the faculty that directs and organizes human life, reason replaces (or supersedes) the physiological or psychological mechanisms by which the activities of other organisms are organized into self-sustaining lives. Reason is free to find new uses for any of our faculties — uses for which they may not have evolved and for which they may not be employed in other species. Reason is likewise free to discover ways to alter these faculties (e.g., via birth control pills, vasectomies, or abortions) to better suit them to these chosen purposes.

In the process of natural selection organs often come to serve purposes other than those for which they initially evolved. There is nothing to prevent reason from similarly repurposing faculties within the span of any individual’s life. New, life-sustaining uses for faculties can be discovered and promulgated through the culture. This is what has happened with the many nonprocreative uses of our sexual faculties by which we pursue pleasure and celebrate spiritual values. Likewise, reason is free to find new ways to achieve the values played by reproduction in individual human lives. Reproduction serves such material values as ensuring that there are young people to assist in one’s dotage, and it serves spiritual values such as having progeny to whom to pass on one’s way of life (which, for a human being, crucially includes one’s ideas and values). All the ways discovered thus far to achieve these values require that some people reproduce; but a given individual needn’t have offspring himself to share in these values. In some social animals (e.g., bees), a small subset of the community specializes in reproduction, and the rest of the community is sterile. So, we cannot infer that every human being should seek to reproduce from the facts that everyone has reproductive organs and that reproduction is a part of life. Fundamentally, what ethics has to say about sex is simply that one should be rational about it; this rationality includes creativity in the formation of values that can meet our physiological and psychological needs and can be achieved through the use of our faculties.

There are many more detailed questions, of course, about what sorts of sex lives can be good for us. Some of these questions (e.g., those involving issues of consent) are straightforwardly ethical and come under some of the moral principles alluded to earlier. But others lie near the border that separates ethics from psychology and they require the empirical research methods of that field. There are many such questions concerning sexual practices that have been derided (by various parties) as “unnatural”: homosexuality, polyamory, polygamy, monogamy, masturbation, incest, relationships between (consenting) people distant in age, fantasizing about abusive forms of sex. Most of us think that at least some of these practices are bad for us, and few of us think that all are. If any one of these practices is bad for us, it must be because it runs contrary to human nature in some way other than its merely being atypical or different from the function that our sexual capacity evolved to serve. This could be because the practice stems from and reinforces a psychological state, such as low self-esteem, which saps our ability and motivation to engage in other vital activities. Or it could be because the sexual practice is incompatible with our using our sexual faculties to satisfy some crucial (physiological or psychological need) that we cannot otherwise meet.

Rand thought that promiscuity and homosexuality were immoral for reasons of the two sorts indicated above.49 I think she was wrong about homosexuality and right about promiscuity. Settling either question would take us beyond the scope of this paper; I mention them here to indicate how Rand’s conception of Man’s Life sets up a standard by which such practices could be established as moral or immoral. The application of this standard will require identifying the actual causal relations in which these practices stand to the essential activities by which human beings sustain ourselves.

This takes us back to the general issue of the objectivity of the moral standard and of how we can differentiate between ways of living that are second nature to us simply because we’re accustomed to them and those that are grounded in our biological nature. A given practice or norm could turn out to be required by the standard of Man’s Life, or to represent one possible way (among others) of satisfying this standard, or to be contrary to this standard (and, therefore, immoral). Aristotelian ethics is not objective, because it lacks the means to distinguish among these three categories; and it is the integration with biological fact that enables Rand’s ethics to do so.

In some cases, the data we need to establish the relevant biological facts are available in ordinary experience. I have in mind facts such as that reason is our means of survival. This fact is biological in the broad sense that it is a fact about living things and how they live. But our knowledge of it doesn’t depend on the science of biology. For it doesn’t require the specialized methods of collecting and analyzing data that distinguish natural science from ordinary rational thinking and from philosophy. Indeed, it is only on the basis of a great deal of such nonspecialized knowledge about various types of living things that a science of biology could get off the ground.

But to settle the sorts of questions of sexual ethics we were just discussing, we need additional knowledge about human nature — and especially about the nature of the human mind. The same is true for a host of other questions pertaining to whether and when one should or can change or resist various desires or emotions — for example, questions concerning addiction (or putative addiction) or concerning states that may be mental illnesses. Most of our moral opinions on issues of these sorts reflect assumptions about these psychological questions. These assumptions are generally informed by our experience, which we can (and sometimes should) critically evaluate and work to enlarge. But they are assumptions of the sort that could be (and, in some cases, have been) confirmed, refuted, or modified by empirical research in psychology and allied fields.

The straightforwardly moral questions — the ones belonging to philosophy — are those that can be answered well without reliance on this specialized research. I think of questions that require research as involving distinguishable philosophical and scientific components. But even if this perspective on these issues is correct, the interplay of philosophical and scientific matters is complex and there are many borderline cases. Much of the subject matter of Aristotelian ethics — or at least of many of the characterological virtues — falls in this complex area at the border of philosophy and psychology. Rand had things to say about such questions as well. Indeed, as a novelist, she couldn’t have avoided issues of psychology (as well as issues on the borderline between it and philosophy), since novel-writing requires projecting characters with complete personalities. But the issues she emphasizes when writing as a moral philosopher are more abstract and structural, and I can find few parallels to them in Aristotle’s ethics.

When she writes about virtues, for example, she focuses not on characterological states but on abstract principles that she argues one must recognize in order to live as a human being — for example, the principle that the unreal is unreal and can be of no value. Of course, to recognize such principles in one’s thinking and conduct, one must apply them contextually, and they must factor centrally into one’s motivation. For this to happen over time, recognition of the principles must be automatized into a perspective on the world and a characteristic form of motivation that we can think of as a characterological virtue. But, for Rand, the concept “virtue” primarily refers to the abstract principle rather than to the form it takes in an individual’s psychology. There is much to explore about how such principles are realized psychologically. Rand addresses some of these in various contexts, and comparison to Aristotle’s accounts of characterological virtue and phronēsis might be illuminating in exploring her views.50 But I see such comparisons as matters of detail when relating Rand’s ethics to Aristotle’s.

The central point of comparison is that each philosopher is recommending to us a certain way of living on the grounds that it is the one for which we are naturally suited as human beings — as rational animals. Each urges us to take Man’s Life as our standard of value, but they differ in their understanding of this life and of how it can serve as a standard. For Aristotle, Man’s Life is the distinctive manner of functioning that is characteristic of human beings and enabled by human nature. Rand adds that it is the process by which human beings survive. This means that, on Rand’s view, to qualify as part of Man’s Life, something must make a vital contribution to that process by which a human being sustains his existence across a human life span.

The moral content that follows from Rand’s conception of Man’s Life is more abstract than the subject matter of the Aristotelian virtues, and because of this, the moral guidance she offers can be objective and precise. For, as Aristotle noted, “the universal is honorable because it reveals the cause” (APo. 88a5–6). Because Rand’s ethics identifies Man’s Life at the right level of abstraction, this ethics can reveal to an individual the causal role played in his own life by each of his chosen values. Thus it enables him to harmonize these values into a life by which he can sustain himself without compromise and experience the profound, “non-contradictory joy” (Atlas 1022) that is the concomitant of living rationally, “in accordance with virtue” (EN 1098a17).

“Chapter 7: ““Man’s Life” as the Standard of Value in the Ethics of Aristotle and Ayn Rand” by Greg Salmieri from Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand by James G. Lennox and Gregor Salmieri, © 2026. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Essential resources:

America’s Failure to Confront Iran: Ayn Rand Comments

(Republished June 19, 2025; originally published, 1980)

What would be the proper course of action for the US during the 1979–81 Iranian hostage crisis? How should we have gone about getting the hostages back?

The U.S. Has Appeased Iran for Decades

(July 17, 2024)

A special collection of clips highlighting some of our analysts’ most compelling warnings and predictions.

‘End States Who Sponsor Terrorism’

(Republished November 7, 2023; originally published October 2, 2001)

Leonard Peikoff diagnosed the policy that made possible the September 11 attacks and warned of the consequences of continuing it: “If our appeasement has led to an escalation of disasters in the past, can it do otherwise in the future?”

‘Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech’

(Republished August 12, 2022; originally published in 1989)

Here is the Ayn Rand Institute’s statement, authored by Leonard Peikoff, upholding the principle of freedom of speech and denouncing the 1989 Iranian death-decree against Rushdie.

20 Years Since 9/11: ARI’s Distinctive Philosophic Analysis

(September 12, 2021)

A compilation of some of ARI’s distinctive commentary and analysis on foreign policy between 2001 and 2021.

ARI’s Uncompromising Voice for Reason Since 9/11

(September 8, 2021)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss the Institute’s analysis of 9/11, the U.S. response to the Islamist threat, and the repercussions today.

Preface to Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism

(August 6, 2021)

In Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism, in which authors Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo evaluate the nature of the militant Islamic threat, the role of a proper foreign policy in defending citizens’ freedom, and the morality of a just war, among other issues. The second edition expands on the first edition’s argument that Islamism is alive and well — and that it cannot be defeated without first understanding it down to its philosophic roots. You can also download the book for free by subscribing to our email list.

Recent Podcasts, interviews and lectures:

Iranian Theocracy on the Brink? Why Protesters Deserve Our Moral Support

(January 14, 2026)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo examine why Iran’s ongoing uprising may be the regime’s most serious challenge yet — and why it deserves far more moral support from the free world.

Principles of a Proper Foreign Policy

(July 2, 2025)

Peter Schwartz argues that a nation’s foreign policy should be guided by the principle of individual rights and aimed at protecting the nation’s freedom. He discusses how to address threats from Iran and elsewhere.

Beyond the ‘Isolationist’-Neoconservative False Choice on Iran

(June 30, 2025)

Yaron Brook and Elan Journo unpack the main arguments surrounding Israel’s strikes on Iran, criticizing both anti-war “isolationists” and pro-war neoconservatives for failing to adopt a rational, self-interested approach to the issue.

News Roundup: The Israel-Iran War

(June 20, 2025)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Israel’s war against Iran: why Israel’s war is a positive development and why a self-interested American foreign policy must break from the legacy of 9/11.

The New Iran Deal: Trump Recycles Obama Amoralism

(May 5, 2025)

Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss the Trump administration’s move to restart nuclear talks with Iran by rehashing Obama’s failed deal.

A Year After October 7: What the Conflict Is Actually About

(October 7, 2024)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss Western misconceptions around October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including why the war is really between Israel and Iran, how pragmatism effects the West’s inability to understand Iran, and how Palestinian grievances help pragmatists evade Iran’s ideology.

How America’s 9/11 Response Enabled October 7

(September 11, 2024)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss how the failure of American post-9/11 policy led to the October 7 attacks, including how religion and altruism undermined the response to Islamic totalitarianism.

Iran Attacks Israel

(April 13, 2024)

Elan Journo offers initial commentary on Iran’s strike on Israel.

Why Iran Fuels the Mideast War

(November 1, 2023)

Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo and Nikos Sotirakopoulos analyze Iran’s ideological aims and militant ambitions, in another episode of our mini-series on shedding light on the Middle East.

Ghate and Journo on What Went Wrong After 9/11

(September 11, 2023)

Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate argue that Biden’s U.S. prisoner swap with the Iranian regime is an example of the same kind of unprincipled appeasement of the Islamist threat that was pervasive before 9/11.

The U.S.-Iran Prisoner Swap: Biden’s Policy of Delusion

(April 31, 2023)

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo discuss the Biden administration’s prisoner swap with the Iranian regime and how it reflects the delusional attitudes and non-objective thinking that lead to America’s continuous foreign policy failures with regard to Islamic totalitarianism.

The Protests in Russia and Iran

(October 5, 2022)

Ben Bayer and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss the recent protests against the authoritarian regimes of Iran and Russia. They analyze the common causes that animate these public demonstrations and offer a philosophical perspective on why they effectively undermine the moral legitimacy of these dictatorships.

The Sorry Legacy of Our Policy Toward Iran

(August 17, 2022)

Onkar Ghate, Agustina Vergara Cid and Nikos Sotirakopoulos discuss Iran’s recent attempts — on American soil — to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a journalist and critic of the Iranian regime, and John Bolton, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, as well as the stabbing of author Salman Rushdie, whose murder Iran has advocated for over 30 years. They discuss the philosophic nature of the Iranian regime and how decades of failed U.S. policy has emboldened Iran and other enemies.

The Charlie Hebdo Assassinations: Six Years Later

(January 6, 2021)

On the sixth anniversary of the murderous attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate discuss the attacks as a symptom of the erosion of free speech in the West.

9/11: Learning the Right Lessons

(September 9, 2020)

Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo and Ben Bayer discuss the legacy of the U.S. response to 9/11 and the lessons we should have learned from it.

Recent articles:

What Iranian Protesters Deserve from Us

(October 26, 2022)

Elan Journo explains why we vastly underappreciate the power of America’s moral sanction.

Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton Paved the Road to 9/11 (Part 1, Part 2)

September 7 and 9, 2022)

Elan Journo argues that in the decades before 9/11, our political leaders failed to recognize that war had been launched against us and that the enemy is Islamic totalitarianism, inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran. They managed only to appease and encourage the enemy’s aggression.

Why U.S. Failed in Afghanistan. No, It’s Not What You Think.

(August 20, 2021)

Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate argue that we should blame our political and intellectual leaders, across two decades, for evading the ideological nature of the enemy and, consequently, miring U.S. forces in a “no-win” war.

Western Apathy Toward Iran’s Religious Dictatorship

(February 17, 2021)

Elan Journo discusses an interview with Iranian activist Shaparak Shajarizadeh.

Flemming Rose on Islamist Threats to Free Speech

(December 9, 2020)

Elan Journo discusses an interview with free speech activist Fleming Rose.

Sept. 11 and the Failure to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism

(September 11, 2019)

Preface to the first edition of Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism.

Jihadists: Understanding the Nature of the Enemy

(April 16, 2018)

Elan Journo identifies the nature and goals of the jihadist threat, as led by the Iranian regime.

See also: ARI’s Resources on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East

Image Credit: Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran via Getty Images

ICE has now announced the end to its recent immigration enforcement “surge” in Minnesota, after its tactics resulted in the death of two people. As ICE tactics continue to undermine due process rights, the New York Times editorial board and kindred others have reflected on the role ICE plays in a broader challenge the Trump administration poses to democracy.¹

Trump’s immigration policies are dramatically unjust. But meaningful reflection on what’s wrong with them means recognizing an uncomfortable fact: they are not “undemocratic” but all too much a product of democracy.

It’s an uncomfortable fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not just in the electoral college but by two million in the popular vote. And he did it by loudly campaigning for his immigration policy. He promised to carry out “the largest deportation effort in American history,” and his running mate suggested starting with deporting one million people.2^,3

Remorseful Trump voters have no excuse for thinking they voted for something else.

The signs of Trump’s democratic roots are often hidden behind critics’ evasive relabeling: his “populism.” His immigration policy aims to scandalize a broad class of voting citizens by demonizing the non-citizen minority. “Populism” is just another name for the democracy that certain elites don’t happen to like. They go back to calling it “democracy” when the majority targets the rights of minorities they happen to despise, like businessmen.

In its basic, original meaning, “democracy” just means majority rule, unconstrained by checks and balances that are designed to protect individual rights.

Remember: the Athenian democracy voted to put Socrates to death. The governments of southern U.S. states — and of the Confederacy — elected politicians and passed popular laws that enslaved millions of African Americans. Even abolition didn’t stop southern majorities from restricting their rights and tolerating lynch mobs under Jim Crow. Majority rule unconstrained by the rights of individuals is majority tyranny.

Many have characterized Trump’s policies and ICE’s tactics as autocratic or even fascistic. They have a point. But democratic fascism is no contradiction. The Nazi party first rose to power in Germany after being freely elected in 1932.4

Trump is not the only one to blame for the rise of fascistic immigration policies. The laws that classify 10 to 15 million people in the U.S. as “illegal” have been on the books for decades. They were passed by duly elected representatives — including the Democrats. It’s these laws that mandate treating immigrants as having no right to travel, work, or live peacefully among us.

The current labyrinthine set of foreign worker quotas that dispenses jobs by permission of the government was first adopted in 1952 by a Democrat-controlled Congress and finalized in 1965 during the heyday of LBJ’s Great Society. Even when “progressive” Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2021, they didn’t prioritize changing the laws.

Democrats have evaded their responsibility for these laws by choosing not to enforce them, as in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But lax enforcement only played into the hands of “law and order” politicians. When Republicans decided to enforce the laws on the books, of course it required massive fascistic intrusion into and destruction of the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should recall that the Founders themselves warned us against unconstrained majority rule (see Madison’s Federalist #10).5 They gave us a system in which our elected officials are constrained by law with checks and balances designed to limit their ability to violate individual rights.

This is sometimes what people mean by our “democracy,” but that’s a misnomer. The Founders gave us not a democracy, but a constitutional republic, a system premised on limiting government’s function solely to protecting the individual’s rights.

The laws Trump is enforcing are not “undemocratic.” But they do violate constitutional rights. Even non-citizens have a right to liberty. Laws restricting immigrant labor violate the freedom to work and engage in trade. But these are freedoms Democrats long ago sold down the river when they sought ever-increasing regulations on the freedom of businessmen.

If Trump’s ICE now assaults procedural rights such as due process, it’s because like so many other presidents, he has habituated action by executive order. This is enabled by a Congress that has delegated so much power to the executive through laws (like immigration laws) aimed at achieving collectivist policy goals that ignore individual rights. Such laws require the oversight of a massive and intrusive administrative state. And the Supreme Court tolerates it all because it is unwilling to apply “strict scrutiny” to any but the most blatantly anti-liberty laws. It recently described the concept of “liberty” as too “capacious” to define clearly, treating with deference any laws adopted through . . . the “democratic process.”6

When a president enforces popular laws passed by Congress and is unconstrained by a docile Supreme Court — the chaotic, tyrannical presence of ICE thugs on our streets “is what democracy looks like.”

Voters made this possible. They need to reflect on the consequences of their past decisions and try to reverse course. Paradoxically, they need to vote for politicians and policies who commit to protect individual rights as sacrosanct — even in the face of what voters demand.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 40 percent of Americans believe in creationism, agreeing most closely with the view that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” By contrast, only 22 percent agree most closely with the view that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”¹

Such widespread rejection of the theory of evolution is fueled in part by the notion that evolution is “just a theory.” This is the idea that evolution is just a speculative hypothesis — on a par with the biblical creation myth — with little-to-no basis in hard, scientific evidence.

The first thing to note about this claim is that it is simply not true — but even worse than the falsehood of the just-a-theory claim is the fact that it represents a grave injustice. To declare that evolution is “just a theory” is to suggest that Charles Darwin was “just a theorist” — that he was some sort of armchair scientist, spinning out scientific guesses in a vacuum instead of drawing his ideas from careful observations of nature. The just-a-theory allegation implies that Darwin formulated his theory without ever getting his hands dirty. But the truth is: Darwin got his hands dirty.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the product of a monumental, lifelong effort to collect and integrate mountains of factual evidence. He developed it only after assembling and reflecting on a large body of compelling observations and data. And he devoted his entire life to finding and gathering facts and arguments supporting the theory, and to considering every possible objection and implication.

In this article, we’ll explore Darwin’s life and work, focusing on the process that he went through to amass and organize the enormous volume of evidence that he used to develop and validate his theory.

Darwin’s Early Life and Education (1809–1831)

Charles Robert Darwin was born February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England, just northwest of Birmingham. He was born into Jane Austen’s England; Pride and Prejudice would be published just four years later. His father, Robert Darwin, was a wealthy doctor; and his mother, Susannah, was the daughter of the pottery magnate Josiah Wedgwood.

Charles Darwin grew up on a country estate and had ample opportunity to develop his early interest in the world of nature. In addition to the surrounding woods and the nearby river, the estate had a large greenhouse for him to explore, and his mother had a collection of fancy pigeons that she kept as pets. As a young boy he began collecting all sorts of things: shells, rocks, insects, bird’s eggs, and more. He would collect plant specimens and try to identify them. By the age of ten, he had developed the habit of wandering off for hours to go bird watching or insect hunting.

Darwin was not a very hardworking student. He was completely uninterested in the classical education he received at the local school and did only the bare minimum of work necessary to get by. His father decided that Charles should follow in his own footsteps and become a doctor, so at the age of sixteen Charles was sent off to Scotland to Edinburgh University to study at its world-renowned medical school.

At university, Darwin was also an indifferent student — at least when it came to the classes in medicine he was taking. But he was interested in such activities as taking excursions to the Scottish coast to collect specimens of marine animals. He did not enjoy his anatomy classes, but just for fun he took private lessons in taxidermy.

One incident that occurred in his first year at Edinburgh basically put the writing on the wall regarding his career as a doctor. As a medical student he was required to observe surgical operations, which, in 1825, were far from the relatively safe and anesthetized affairs of today. One that he attended, on a small child, was so gruesome that he left in horror and never again set foot in an operating theater.

In his second year at medical school, he signed up for a number of classes on . . . geology and natural history. He studied techniques for preserving and labeling plant and animal specimens for collection and analysis, techniques that, as one biography points out, are “completely useless for anyone seriously intending to practice medicine.”2

Darwin joined a natural history society and, with friends he made there, went on geological expeditions and trips to the coast to muck around in tidal pools. One of these friends was Robert Grant, a lecturer from the university who was a world-renowned expert on marine invertebrates. Under Grant’s tutelage, Darwin learned how to dissect and analyze organisms, and he made original contributions of his own to Grant’s research on primitive marine creatures.

Darwin continued his medical studies for a while, but his heart was clearly elsewhere, and, once again, he did only the bare minimum necessary to get by. At the end of his second year at Edinburgh, he gave up on medicine and left the university without a degree. At this point, Charles’s father was getting a bit frustrated. His father was not going to let him squander his inheritance pursuing fruitless hobbies; he decided that if Charles was not going to be a doctor, then he needed to do something else that would at least be respectable. If Charles did not want to continue with medicine, then he would have to study for the church and plan for a life as a respectable country clergyman. So Charles was sent off to Cambridge to study divinity — which he did with about as much enthusiasm as he had done medicine. What really interested him at Cambridge was collecting beetles, which was all the rage at the time, and his obsession with building and studying his beetle collection was the beginning of a lifelong interest in entomology.

In spite of Robert Darwin’s most sincere efforts to shape his son’s future, there was no denying that what Charles was really passionate about was natural science. He did complete his bachelor’s degree in divinity; he spent the required three years at Cambridge and, by cramming like crazy in his third year, he managed to pass his final exams. But he spent most of his time during those three years pursuing his other interests.

He became friends with a botany professor by the name of John Henslow and took three years worth of botany classes from him (not exactly essential for an Anglican priest in training). Henslow encouraged him to read a six-volume book by the scientific explorer Alexander von Humboldt describing Humboldt’s travels and scientific discoveries in South America. This really fired up Darwin, and it planted the idea in his mind of setting off around the world and exploring the flora and fauna of exotic lands.

Darwin also began studying with Adam Sedgwick, a prominent field geologist and professor of geology at Cambridge. Recognizing young Darwin’s talent and enthusiasm, Sedgwick took him under his wing. He took Darwin on expeditions and taught him the rigorous techniques of geological fieldwork (again, not exactly a critical skillset for the priesthood).

By the time Darwin graduated from Cambridge with his degree in divinity, he was, as one biography put it, “thoroughly versed in botany and entomology, had more than a smattering of zoology, knew how to prepare and preserve specimens, [and] was an expert field geologist who had been taught his trade by one of the Vice-Presidents of the Geological Society of London.”3

In other words, when Darwin left for home to begin preparing for his career in the church, he was thoroughly trained and ready . . . for a career as a scientist. And the big question he faced was: What was he going to do with all that training?

The Voyage of the Beagle (1831–1836)

Fortunately for Darwin, and for the rest of mankind, the perfect opportunity arose. On the recommendation of Professor Henslow, who had contacts in the British Admiralty, Darwin was invited to accompany the captain of the HMS Beagle, which was being sent to conduct a survey of coastal South America. On December 27, 1831, the Beagle set sail on what would end up being a five-year voyage circumnavigating the globe.

The journey gave Darwin an unparalleled opportunity to immerse himself in the work of making detailed, firsthand, scientific observations of nature. He was invited on board partly to serve as a gentleman companion to the captain and partly to serve as the ship’s naturalist. And in those days, the job of the ship’s naturalist was to conduct a systematic, scientific analysis of the regions visited on the journey — to observe and study the flora and fauna, to collect plant, animal, and geological specimens, and so on.

At various points of the voyage, Darwin left the ship and set off inland, sometimes for months at a time, before rejoining the Beagle and sailing on to the next port of call. He collected exotic beetles in the jungles of Brazil; he gathered seashells and sponges and corals from the coast of Patagonia (what is now Argentina); he collected specimens of birds and tortoises from the Galapagos Islands, west of Ecuador.

Darwin amassed a huge collection of specimens, which he shipped back to England in crate after crate. Just as importantly, he filled notebook after notebook with his scientific observations — on the geology of the regions he explored, and on the plant and animal species he encountered.

One often sees images of Darwin as an old, bearded, Victorian gentleman, and it is tempting to think of him as a sedentary scholar, sitting in his armchair and philosophizing about nature. But the Darwin that one encounters upon reading about the Beagle voyage depicts exactly the opposite image: He is a vigorous, almost swashbuckling young man, tramping off into the Brazilian jungle with his notebook and his shotgun.

With his own hands, he dug out of cliff walls fossils of ancient creatures the size of horses. He hunted for his own supper almost as much as for biological specimens — eating, for example, such delicacies as roasted armadillo. On one occasion, he had eaten half of a large ostrich-like bird when he suddenly realized that it was an unusual species that hadn’t been described before. So he packed up the rest of the roast to ship home with his other specimens! Darwin was not an armchair scientist; he did not just theorize in a library, shut off from the world outside. He was an active observer of nature who traveled to the far corners of the world gathering facts and who got his hands dirty, literally.

By the time Darwin returned to England after five years’ traveling the world, he had amassed a wealth of factual data. One biography summarizes his haul as follows: He had “1383 pages of geology notes, 368 pages of zoology notes, a catalogue of 1529 species in spirits and 3907 labeled skins, bones and miscellaneous specimens, as well as a live baby tortoise from the Galapagos Islands.”4

Darwin had already sent parts of his 770-page diary home, and they were already being circulated among England’s scientific elite, who were eager to embrace him as one of their own.

But in addition to his notes and his specimens, and the respect these won for him among scientists, Darwin got an unexpected benefit from his travels: The Beagle voyage helped him to find his true calling in life. It set him on the path to engaging in the work that would occupy the rest of his days — indeed, the work that would eventually bring about a major revolution in science.

Before he had even set foot back on the shores of England, Darwin had formulated a new plan for his future. After five years of single-mindedly pursuing scientific discovery, the notion of going home and settling down in a church parsonage was simply out of the question. He was determined to forge a career for himself as a gentleman scientist.

It is important to recognize that the mass of notes and specimens that Darwin had accumulated were not completed scientific discoveries; they were just the raw material for scientific discovery. Darwin understood perfectly well that that raw material had to be processed, studied, digested — converted into useful products, which for a scientist means scientific papers, lectures, treatises. For Darwin to return home and do nothing with the fruits of his scientific harvest would render his collection a heap of junk and his five-year journey a waste of time and effort.

Upon his return, and with his father’s support — both moral and, more importantly, financial — Darwin set to work. His first order of business was to find a home for his collection and to delegate the detailed analysis of his specimens to experts in different fields. Darwin’s education had exposed him to broad areas of natural science, but to fully and properly reap the fruits of his Beagle findings, he would have to farm out parts of the work to specialists who were highly trained in particular areas.

He had his fossil specimens studied by a leading expert in comparative anatomy, his mammals cataloged by the museum curator of the London Zoological Society, his reptiles examined by a zoology professor at King’s College, and his plants studied by a team of botanists. He delegated the study of his birds to an expert ornithologist who discovered, much to Darwin’s surprise, that the birds he had brought back from the Galapagos Islands — which he thought composed a fairly diverse collection — were in fact almost all different species of the common finch.

Darwin himself undertook the work of writing up his geological findings. At this point in his life, Darwin considered himself to be primarily a geologist, not a biologist, and his main priority was reporting the geological observations he had made on his travels. At the same time, he was positively brimming with questions raised by his observations, questions in the field of biology as much as in that of geology. The most important question that captured his attention was one of the most important mysteries of Darwin’s day: the mystery of the origin of species.

Evolution Before Darwin

At the time of Darwin’s return to England in 1836, the question of how all the various living species originated was ripe for serious scientific consideration. About a century earlier, Carl von Linnaeus had introduced the modern system of biological classification, organizing all living species into nested groups of genus, order, class, and so on. Linnaeus’s system is based on a hierarchy of similarities and differences among the species, and forms a branching, tree-like structure that looks curiously like a family tree.

In Linnaeus’s day, however, this similarity to a family tree would have been regarded as only a curious coincidence. Few would have suspected that all living species are actually related to each other in the same way in which you are related to your second (and 102nd) cousins. The prevailing view was, of course, the creationist view that each species was formed independently by a special act of miraculous creation.

Furthermore, it was generally held that species are immutable, unchanging. After all, the book of Genesis describes all living creatures as reproducing “after their kind,” meaning that the offspring resemble the parents. The commonly held view was that species might be capable of a certain amount of variation but only within tightly circumscribed limits. The notion that, say, birds and reptiles are distant cousins on a single family tree is one that most people would have found absurd.

On the other hand, speculation along the lines of evolution went back to ancient Greece. A handful of thinkers before Darwin had put forward the idea that species are related — that life began in some primitive form and then gradually changed, transforming by some mechanism, and branching out into all the diverse species alive today. In fact, Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one such thinker; in the 1790s he wrote a book called Zoonomia that included a vague hypothesis about the evolutionary origin of species.

The most influential theory of evolution before Charles Darwin’s was put forward by French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Lamarck proposed that species are not unique, independent creations but are the modified, transformed descendants of other species. He took seriously the family-tree-like structure suggested by the Linnaean system and proposed a theory to explain how species change.

As a young man, Charles Darwin read Lamarck’s writings and was impressed by a couple of points. For one thing, Lamarck was seeking natural as opposed to supernatural explanations. Darwin recognized a pressing need to see biology as a field governed by scientific law — just as physics, astronomy, and chemistry had come to be seen. Later, in Origin of Species, Darwin would praise Lamarck by saying that he did “the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic, world being the result of law and not of miraculous interposition.”5

Darwin was also impressed by some of the evidence that Lamarck tried to bring to bear on the subject, evidence showing that species are not always markedly different from each other. In some groups of organisms there is an almost continuous variation in characteristics among different species in a group, which makes it plausible to view them as the gradually modified descendants of a common ancestor, rather than as a number of independently created species.

Although Darwin found certain valuable elements in Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, he was not impressed with Lamarck’s proposal for the causal mechanism driving evolutionary change. Lamarck held that changes occur as a result of organisms striving to be better adapted to their environment; this striving causes slight changes in their characteristics, which are then passed on to their offspring and build up over generations. Lamarck’s classic example of this is a giraffe stretching up to the leaves on branches just out of reach. Striving to reach the higher leaves stretches the giraffe’s neck slightly and it then produces baby giraffes with slightly longer necks. If this were to continue generation after generation, one could explain the transformation of a giraffe ancestor with a normal-sized neck into the modern giraffe.

The problem with Lamarck’s explanation is that it simply is not true that characteristics acquired during an organism’s life are passed on in reproduction. If you were to dye your hair green or lose an arm in an accident, you would not expect to then have a baby with green hair or a missing arm.

Darwin was also, as one would expect, aware of his grandfather’s writings on evolution, which are strikingly similar to those of Lamarck. Erasmus Darwin was quite famous in his day, and his writings were part of the family lore. Charles had read Zoonomia as a young man and rather admired it. But neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck had a fully convincing argument for evolution. Their works were too speculative and insufficiently supported by evidence and facts. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin writes that upon reading Zoonomia for a second time, he was “much disappointed, the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.”6

Hence, when Darwin set sail around the world, he was, like almost every other scientist in his day, a firm believer in “special creation.” He was aware of evolutionary thinking but held the commonly accepted view that each species was created independently of every other species. At the same time, however, he was becoming aware of other developments in early nineteenth-century science that would prove to be highly suggestive of evolution.

In geology, scientists had reached the conclusion that the major features of the earth are the result of slow, gradual changes built up over long periods of time. They had thrown out the attempt to explain earth’s geology by means of supernatural cataclysms such as Noah’s flood. But the geologist Charles Lyell had gone further and thrown out the appeal to cataclysms as such. In his Principles of Geology, he argued that even the largest-scale effects in geology, such as the raising of massive mountain ranges or the carving out of deep canyons, are the result not of massive, catastrophic events but of small-scale, everyday processes acting over unimaginably long time scales.

On board the Beagle, Darwin read the first volume of Lyell’s three-volume treatise, which had been published in 1830. From his geological observations during the voyage, Darwin saw the truth of Lyell’s views writ large on the very rocks themselves. As he set about collecting plant and animal specimens, the Lyellian idea of incremental changes accumulated over vast ages was at the forefront of Darwin’s mind.

Darwin’s travels around the world and his hard work as a naturalist revealed to him new facts about life on earth. As noted above, he brought home a vast array of specimens collected from all over the globe. When he returned home and studied his collections and reflected on his findings, a host of questions arose in his mind that challenged his creationist views.

For example, why should two regions that have almost identical physical conditions be inhabited by completely different forms of life? Consider the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of South America, and the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa — both of which Darwin visited. Both are volcanic archipelagos off the west coast of a large continent; they are extremely similar in every aspect of their environmental conditions: climate, height, size, the volcanic nature of their soil, and so on. Yet the species native to these islands are completely different.

On the premise of special creation, one might expect the opposite to be true. If God designed each creature to be perfectly adapted to its environment, then one would expect that places with identical environmental conditions would be inhabited by identical species. But that is not what one finds.

Furthermore, compare the Galapagos Islands with the South American mainland. In this case, the environmental conditions of the islands are completely different from those of the mainland — and yet the species on the islands are dramatically similar to the mainland species. As Darwin later wrote: “There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate . . . which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact, there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects.”7 And still, he finds,

the naturalist, looking at the inhabitants of these volcanic islands in the Pacific, distant several hundred miles from the continent, yet feels that he is standing on American land. Why should this be so? Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America?8

Again, on the premise of special creation, one would expect the opposite. One would expect regions with dramatically different environmental conditions to be inhabited by dramatically different species. But that is not what one finds.

What these facts suggested to Darwin was that the island species were related to their mainland counterparts. He envisioned volcanic islands rising out of the ocean entirely bereft of life and then being populated by colonists from the nearest coastal mainland — the Galapagos Islands by species from South America, the Cape Verde Islands by species from Africa. Breeding in isolation from their relatives on the mainland, the descendants of the colonists gradually transform and adapt to the island conditions of their new home. Ultimately, they evolve into completely new species, but continue to bear an uncanny resemblance to the species on the nearest mainland — which is exactly what one finds.

Darwin assembled and reflected on a host of facts like these from the field of biogeography, the study of the geographical distribution of living creatures. These observations raised crucial questions in his mind and got him thinking along evolutionary lines.

Consider another example: the fossil species that Darwin had unearthed in South America. These turned out to be similar in many ways to currently existing South American animals. But they were also clearly not members of currently existing species. For instance, he had found fossils of giant, extinct species of rodent, armadillo, llama, and sloth — and they were similar, but not identical, to modern species of South American rodents, armadillos, llamas, and sloths.

Why did these extinct species die out? And when were the new species “created”? More curiously, why would the earlier existing species in a given region be so similar to those living there now? That is, why do the fossil rodents of South America resemble modern South American rodents more than they do, say, European rodents or African rodents?

Again, on the premise of special creation, these questions have no answers. Darwin’s observations suggest that modern creatures are the evolved descendants of earlier ones. The South American fossil species resemble modern South American species because they are actually related to them; they are the literal ancestors of the modern forms.

These kinds of questions and considerations convinced Darwin that evolution, or “transmutation” as he called it then, might shed some light on the origin of species and was an idea worth exploring further.

In July 1837, just nine months after his return from his travels, Darwin opened a fresh notebook and wrote a single word on the title page: Zoonomia. Using a notebook expressly dedicated — in homage to his grandfather — to contemplating organic transmutation, he began, as he put it, “patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts”9 related to the origin of species.

It is important to note that at the time Darwin began his research on evolution, he was busy with many projects. Recall that his main order of business was to supervise the analysis of his Beagle collections and to write up the results for publication. This was a huge effort that required delegating and coordinating the work of a whole team of specialist scientists.

The years immediately following Darwin’s return to England in 1836 were incredibly productive. Darwin describes them as “the most active ones which I ever spent.”10 He was editing his travel journal for publication; he was writing technical papers and presenting them before scientific societies in London; he was writing up his geological findings of the Beagle voyage; he was overseeing the publication of a set of volumes on the zoological findings of the Beagle voyage (the analyses of the animal specimens he collected were being written up as a series of expert reports); and, in 1838, he proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, whom he married in January 1839.

Clearly, Darwin had a lot on his mind. But all the while he was filling up notebook after notebook on the “transmutation” of species — collecting facts, anecdotes, questions, arguments — and thinking about them deeply. One biography reports that he was so obsessed with this work that he even took time on his wedding day to open one of his species notebooks to record Uncle Wedgwood’s “views on turnips.”11

Evidence of “Transmutation”

Like Lamarck, Darwin began to take seriously the family-tree-like structure suggested by the Linnaean system. On the theory of evolution, this structure is an actual genealogy, an actual family tree — and thinking of it that way helped to explain a host of curious facts.

For instance, people had long noticed that the bones in the forelimbs of all vertebrate animals have a common structure. This is hard to explain on the premise that they are all independently created species. But on the premise that they all inherited that bone structure from a common ancestor, it makes perfect sense. As Darwin was later to ask: “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?”12 Darwin collected and considered a host of facts like these from the field of comparative anatomy — and found a ready explanation for them in terms of the evolutionary family tree.

Or consider the phenomenon of rudimentary organs, such as the human appendix, or the wings of flightless birds. Darwin also knew of species of beetles whose wings are not only incapable of flight but lie under wing cases that are completely sealed shut. How can “intelligent design” explain such utterly useless organs? A typical explanation in Darwin’s day was that rudimentary organs are included to complete the “symmetry” of God’s plan, to which Darwin replied in his notebook: “What bosch!!”13

But on the premise that species are the modified descendants of earlier species, one can explain rudimentary organs as the remnants of organs that once were functional but are no longer. For example, beetles living on small and exposed islands would be in danger of being blown out to sea if they retained the power of flight. Evolution, Darwin realized, would act over time to gradually shrink the wings and render them harmless. And they certainly cannot pose a danger if they are safely sealed away under a wing case that cannot open.

Darwin collected myriad facts and posed a host of questions on the phenomenon of rudimentary organs. The winner of them all, arguably, is: “Why do men have nipples?” Pondering this question, Darwin contemplated the possibility that the distant ancestor of all mammals was a species of hermaphrodite; that is, a species possessing both male and female sexual organs. Perhaps, he mused, male nipples are just remnants of female anatomy, vestiges of the process by which an ancestral hermaphrodite species evolved into a species with separated sexes.

Darwin also pursued the subject of domestic breeding. Recall the prevailing view in his day that species possessed a limited capacity for change, that transmutation could occur only within tight limits. But if the correct explanation for the origin of all species is evolution from common ancestral forms, then species would have to be capable, given enough time, of almost unlimited change.

So Darwin sought the expertise of farmers and horticulturalists to explore the limits of organic variation. After all, one goal of expert breeders is to modify plants and animals in order to bring out desirable qualities — woollier sheep or hardier strains of wheat. Darwin began quizzing everyone he met who knew anything about domestic breeding. He spoke to gamekeepers, zookeepers, gardeners; he spoke to friends and relatives who managed their country estates; he spoke to fanciers who bred exotic varieties of pigeon; he even quizzed his London hairdresser, who was interested in pedigree dogs. He began reading magazines and manuals of all kinds on the cultivation of pigs and poultry and potatoes and more.

It is worth pausing here to reflect on just how radical Darwin’s actions were for a scientist in his day. Other “natural philosophers” contemplating such lofty questions as the origin of species would perhaps not have been as likely to step out of the ivory tower and into the barnyard. But Darwin was eager to follow the evidence wherever it led him — even if it led him to the pigpen or the fancy pigeon club.

Darwin’s investigations into domestic plants and animals gave him a great deal of data concerning variations among domestic species, and how those variations arose. He assembled and organized and reflected on these data as well as on others concerning variation in the wild.

Darwin assembled and reflected on a range of facts concerning the family-tree relationships of all creatures (the similarities and differences among organisms, such as the vertebrate hand bones or the rudimentary organs); he assembled and reflected on a range of facts concerning the fossil record; he assembled and reflected on a range of facts concerning biogeography, such as his Galapagos finches; he became, as he put it later, a “complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts.”14

And as he put all these facts together, the outlines for a theory of evolution gradually took shape. He wrote to a friend that he had been working on a “delightful number of new views, which have been coming in, thickly and steadily, on the classification & affinities & instincts of animals — bearing on the question of species — note book after note book has been filled with facts which begin to group themselves clearly under sub-laws.”15

As he assembled these facts and identified these “sub-laws,” it became more and more plausible to him that all living species are actually related — and that evolutionary changes have occurred. What he had not yet worked out, however, was how those changes occurred. What was the causal mechanism driving evolution?

“A Theory by Which to Work”

The key to the discovery of the causal mechanism turned out to be his study of domestic breeding. He began to see domestic breeding and the cultivation of new or better varieties of plants and animals as analogous to how new varieties and species might arise in nature.

A breeder enhances a desirable quality in a breed by very carefully selecting individuals to breed together. By selecting only the best animals and breeding them together — or selecting the best fruits and cultivating only their seeds — man has improved and adapted his domestic species to suit his needs, sometimes transforming them greatly in the process.

What Darwin realized is that nature also exercises a kind of selection, and that its power of selection could also bring about great transformations. Its agent of selection is not the purposeful eye of the human breeder but the natural occurrences of disease, starvation, predation, death.

In September 1838, Darwin opened a book that had a profound impact on his thinking: An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus. Malthus’s book was an attempt to identify the factors limiting human population growth. He used statistical arguments to calculate the rate at which people reproduce and to compare that to the rate at which the food supply could increase. The result was a bleak, doomsday prediction that population growth would outstrip food production, leading to mass starvation, disease, and war. (When environmentalists today wail about scarce resources and issue doomsday predictions of a “population bomb,” they are sometimes criticized as being “Malthusian.”)

Although Malthus’s conclusions are false as applied to man (because reasoning minds make possible technological innovations that invalidate Malthus’s assumed limits on the growth of food production),16 Darwin realized that Malthus’s arguments were extremely enlightening as applied to plants and animals. All living species produce many more offspring in each generation than can possibly survive; the struggle to survive is a fierce competition that most individuals will lose. Darwin saw that this would give rise to a kind of natural selection that is analogous to the selection exercised by breeders.

Darwin combined this Malthusian argument with the ideas he had already worked out concerning variation in nature and the family-tree relationships among living organisms. The result was an explanation for how evolution occurs: Organisms reproduce after their kind but with minor modifications — a certain degree of variation is always naturally occurring among individuals of the same species. Those variations will be passed on to the offspring of any individuals that survive to reproduce. But, as just noted, very few individuals will, in fact, survive to reproduce. The struggle for existence is fierce; every tiny little advantage matters; every little difference makes a difference. As Darwin explained it:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and, as consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.17

Darwin saw that the unrelenting character of the struggle for existence would imply an unrelenting process driving greater and greater diversity and complexity in nature. As small changes accumulate over massive stretches of time, competition imposes a steady pressure forcing evolutionary change. More and more diverse forms of life arise as species evolve to fill all available niches in the economy of nature. And more and more complex forms of life arise as more intricate adaptations make possible more intricate means of survival.

Darwin was finally able to explain the origin of all the various forms of life that we find in nature, in all their wondrous complexity; natural selection was the final piece of the puzzle, the basic causal mechanism driving evolutionary change. His hard work had paid off. Within two years of returning from his travels, Darwin had found an explanation for the origin of species.

Perhaps most interesting about this period is how Darwin, himself, judged the status of the theory he had discovered. At this point, Darwin did not regard evolution as a proven theory.

He had assembled and integrated enough evidence to work out the essential elements of the theory, and he had identified a plausible causal mechanism that could explain how evolution occurs. But he knew that he still had a lot of work to do to prove all the details of the theory. At this point, Darwin regarded his theory as a solid working hypothesis, or, as he later put it in his autobiography, as “a theory by which to work.”18 But it was not yet a theory that he regarded as conclusively proven.

Consider this in light of the widespread attack on evolution as “just a theory.” The careful objectivity with which Darwin assessed the cognitive status of his own work stands in such stark contrast to that utterly ignorant, knee-jerk dismissal of the theory. But polemics aside, it is interesting to consider how hard a scientist has to work even to come up with a good hypothesis — let alone to prove a fundamental theory. Darwin’s two years of determined thinking were not the end of his work on evolution; they were just the beginning.

Darwin continued to work on evolution while forging ahead with his many other projects, which dragged on and on.

He spent ten years writing up his Beagle findings. After his travel journal was published in 1839, he started putting out volumes on his geological discoveries. In 1842, he published a study of the formation of coral reefs, based partly on research he did while the Beagle stopped at a coral atoll in the Indian Ocean. In 1844, he published his observations on the geology of the volcanic islands he visited, such as the Galapagos Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. And in 1846, he published his observations on the geology of South America.

Amidst all of this, he continued accumulating facts, considering objections, and developing his arguments on evolution. In 1842, he wrote a brief, 35-page abstract of the theory, which he expanded in 1844 into a 231-page “sketch.” But he was still not yet ready to go public with it. He put the sketch in his desk drawer, with a note to his wife instructing her to arrange for its publication “in case of my sudden death.”19 And he continued gathering facts and developing his arguments.

By 1846, his geology books were done; he was almost finished with the Beagle work; and he was almost ready to turn his attention full-time to the “species question” — almost ready, because one more little piece of the Beagle work was left to complete.

On the coast of Chile in 1835, Darwin had collected a tiny and very unusual species of barnacle. It was a parasitic barnacle that made its way in the world by boring inside a conch shell and setting up home there. Darwin anticipated that he would write some short, scientific papers describing this new species. He wrote to a friend: “I am going to begin some papers on the lower marine animals, which will last me some months, perhaps a year, & then I shall begin looking over my ten-year-long accumulation of notes on species.”20

But he soon ran into a problem: In order to properly classify his one little barnacle species, he had to know something about the taxonomy of barnacles in general. And in 1846, the field of barnacle taxonomy (despite its obvious, inherent sexiness as an area of research) was in a state of complete chaos.

Barnacles were originally thought to be a kind of mollusk, like clams or mussels. But it was discovered in 1830 that they are actually crustaceans, built on the same general body plan as crabs and shrimp. Zoologists had a pressing need for an up-to-date, systematic study of these misunderstood creatures.

Barnacles, Barnacles, Barnacles

Darwin began collecting other barnacle species. He wrote to colleagues requesting specimens, and he began the painstaking, delicate work of dissecting them and comparing their anatomy. Very quickly, the project got completely out of hand. Word got out on the barnacle-enthusiast grapevine that Darwin was on the job, and next thing he knew he was up to his eyeballs in barnacles; people from all over the world were sending him specimens. Collecting fossil barnacles as well as living species, he began grouping whole families, orders, and genera of barnacle.

Instead of a few short papers describing his one little friend from Chile, Darwin ended up undertaking the Herculean task of organizing and classifying the entire subclass Cirripedia (the scientific term for barnacles).

By 1852, his project of “some months” had been dragging on for six years. He wrote to his cousin saying: “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow moving ship.”21

By 1853, he had been dissecting barnacles for seven years. At this time, four of his children were actually younger than seven years old, which means that all they ever knew him to do in his work life was sit hunched over his microscope studying barnacles. As one biography noted, they must have concluded that this is what all fathers do, because one of them asked about a neighbor’s father: “Where does he do his barnacles?”22

By 1854, the project was completed at last. After eight years of intense labor, he was finally through with barnacles for good. The result was four technical monographs on cirripedes, which were published to great acclaim.

Darwin estimated that in the eight years he spent on the barnacle work, he lost about two years worth of working time to illness. He suffered from a mysterious health condition, which slowed his work considerably. Symptoms first appeared in the years just following his return from the voyage on the Beagle and continued intermittently until his death in 1882. He suffered from frequent stomach cramps and vomiting spells, he had headaches and all sorts of skin disorders, and for long periods of time he was able to work for only a couple of hours each day. The exact nature of Darwin’s illness has been the subject of much scholarly debate, but it appears to have eluded scholars and remains somewhat of a mystery.

Even without the health delays, however, the barnacle project took far longer than Darwin had intended. He could be the patron saint of anyone who has begun a project only to see it expand out of control and become a monumental task taking way longer than anticipated. But, in the end, the barnacle work proved to be extremely useful to him.

For one thing, it was his public debut as a biologist, as opposed to a geologist (recall that prior to this work, his primary focus was on his geological discoveries from the Beagle voyage). The barnacle work expanded his expertise into the field of zoology, and the experience of working out in exhaustive detail the classification of an entire suborder of species gave him the knowledge and confidence to speak authoritatively on species.

More importantly, the barnacles provided crucial evidence for his theory of evolution. Barnacles exhibit a large degree of natural variation, a key element of Darwin’s theory. Natural selection can operate only if there are natural variations among individuals — natural variations that make a difference for survival and reproduction.

By systematically studying all of the barnacle species and comparing their bodily structures, he learned a great deal about the extent of variation in nature. As he said in a letter to a friend: “I have been struck . . . with the variability of every part in some slight degree of every species: when the same organ is rigorously compared in many individuals I always find some slight variability.”23

Another piece of supporting evidence came from a set of surprising discoveries he made about barnacle reproduction. Barnacles are usually hermaphrodites (possessing both male and female reproductive organs). But in the course of his study, Darwin found a number of curious exceptions to this rule.

A number of barnacle species turned out to have two separate sexes, but the adult males were tiny, rudimentary organisms that live as parasites within the shell of the female. In some cases, Darwin found that each female had a collection of, as he put it, “little husbands”24 that consisted of “mere bags of spermatozoa”25 without even a mouth or stomach.

Other species Darwin found were even more curious. They were hermaphrodites, but also possessed a collection of tiny, parasitic males. The male organs of each hermaphrodite individual, though functional, were smaller than usual and were supplemented by the extra, “complemental” males.

What this proved is that, within a species, in addition to the fact that sexual identity can be mixed, the degrees of maleness and femaleness can vary. It is not true that a species is either fully hermaphroditic or composed of fully separate male and female sexes. As Darwin had long suspected, an initially hermaphroditic species can evolve by a continuous series of slight modifications into a species with separate sexes.

Indeed, in the end Darwin actually found a whole series of barnacle species displaying a graduated range of varying degrees of sexual differentiation. Darwin’s notebook musings on the origin of male nipples had been validated in nature beyond his wildest imaginings. In great excitement, he wrote about all this to a friend: “I never sh^d. have made this out, had not my species theory convinced me that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by insensibly small stages; & here we have it, for the male organs in the hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, & independent males already formed.”26

The Origin of The Origin

Having completed his barnacle work at long last, Darwin emerged from the project with strong new evidence for his theory of species, and he was able finally — eighteen years after his return from the Beagle voyage — to turn his attention to evolution full-time.

Although he had been collecting evidence and reflecting on the arguments for and against his theory for years, he still had myriad details to consider and unresolved questions to explore.

For example, he had gathered large amounts of evidence about the distribution of plants and animals around the world, such as the facts concerning the Galapagos species; but in order to explain that distribution, he had to be able to explain how organisms could get from one place to another. How, for instance, could mainland plant species get to distant islands?

It occurred to him that seeds might simply float across the ocean. But when he asked his botanist friends about this, he was told that seeds are killed by salt water. On the other hand, it turned out that nobody he talked to had ever put them in salt water to see if that was true! So Darwin decided to try it. He launched into a series of experiments, floating seeds of all types in salt water. He kept them there for weeks at a time and then checked whether they would germinate.

To his surprise and delight, he found that the assumption that they would quickly die was simply false. He was able to grow plants from seeds that had been immersed in brine for twenty-eight days, and a colleague was able to do so after an even longer immersion. Using a nautical atlas, he calculated from the speed of various currents how far a seed could travel in the time available and found that it could go a distance of up to nine hundred miles, certainly far enough to account for the data he had collected. In addition to floating seeds, he tested a number of other methods of transport, including by birds. To get a sense of the lengths he went to in these inquiries, consider the following quotation from The Origin of Species, where he describes some of this work:

I forced many kinds of seeds into the stomachs of dead fish, and then gave their bodies to fishing-eagles, storks and pelicans; these birds after an interval of many hours, either rejected the seeds in pellets or passed them in their excrement; and several of these seeds retained their power of germination.27

Other lines of evidence also required further development. Consider Darwin’s argument from domestic breeding. To explore the similarities between natural selection and man’s “artificial selection,” he decided to study a particular domestic species in depth: domestic pigeons.

Recognizing the degree to which his immersion in barnacles enabled him to acquire expertise at taxonomical classification, he threw himself into the strange subculture of the fancy pigeon breeder to explore the power of domestic selection. He built an aviary at his house and began to acquire exotic breeds — at one point keeping almost ninety birds. He read treatises on pigeon breeding, hunting down references going back to ancient Rome and Egypt. He had correspondents send him pigeon skins from India and Persia. He joined pigeon clubs and talked pigeon lore with an assortment of pigeon fanciers.

This effort produced strong evidence in support of his theory. In the few centuries that people had been keeping pigeons, they had produced a variety of breeds that were so different that zoologists finding them in the wild would have classified them as different species — and some as even belonging to different genera. Yet, a number of lines of evidence established that they were all descended from a single pigeon species. This showed that, starting with small, naturally occurring variations among individuals in a single species, the careful selection of breeding pairs could magnify those variations into substantial differences.

If man could do this over a mere few hundred years, could there be any doubt of the power of natural selection to bring about, over the immense time scale of geological history, the diversity of forms that exist in nature? Whales and horses differ so greatly that it seems impossible that they could be descendants of a common ancestor. But if man, who can select breeding pairs based only on visually observable differences, can produce a wide variety of pigeon breeds in the blink of a geological eye, then surely over tens of millions of years natural selection, which acts on all characteristics — seen and unseen — that have bearing on survival and reproduction, could transform an ancient mammal species into both whale and horse.

Contemplating the “thousand intermediate forms”28 that must have existed between such creatures as the otter and its land ancestor, Darwin wrote: “Opponents will say, show me them. I will answer yes, if you show me every step between bull Dog & Greyhound.”29

The image of Darwin as an experimental scientist is as atypical as the image of Darwin as the Beagle’s resident Indiana Jones. Yet he conducted any experiment he thought was necessary and relevant to his theory. At one point, he even tickled aphids to see if he could get them to excrete nectar for him as they do for ants. There is no room in science (or in any area of thought, for that matter) for unfounded assertions. If something needs to be put to the experimental test, then a true scientist will engage accordingly, even if it means tickling insects or collecting fishy pelican poop.

Darwin spent a number of years conducting these sorts of experiments and filling in details on his theory. At long last, he was ready to pull together all the data and threads of evidence he had accumulated, and to arrange and organize his vast collection of facts.

He began writing a book, to be called Natural Selection, that would present the full, scientific case for his theory. He planned it to be a massive, multi-volume tome, like Lyell’s Principles of Geology — systematic and thorough, and replete with the full apparatus of scholarly discourse, including voluminous notes and references.

But almost two years into the writing, with ten chapters finished, Darwin’s plans were completely overturned. On June 18, 1858, he received a letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace had discovered independently the essential elements of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and he wrote to see what Darwin thought of it!

Darwin was shocked and distraught. Wallace had asked him to circulate the letter to other interested scientists, if he thought it worthy. Being intimately aware of the worthiness of the theory, Darwin felt obliged to send Wallace’s letter to a scientific journal for immediate publication. And being the gentleman that he was, Darwin would not dream of doing otherwise, even though it would mean that Wallace would be forever credited with the major scientific discovery that had comprised Darwin’s life’s work.

Fortunately, the crisis was resolved amicably and to the satisfaction of all parties (a rare occasion in the history of scientific priority disputes). Friends arranged for the publication of Wallace’s letter alongside excerpts from Darwin’s unpublished writings, including his 1844 sketch. These were read before a meeting of the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858, and published in its journal.

The incident, however, was a wake-up call to Darwin, who realized that he had better put out a book quickly presenting the details of the theory, rather than continue to labor on his large, technical treatise. In less than a year, he dashed off one of the immortal works in the history of science: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that evolution by natural selection is a theory that pertains to all life on earth. To prove a fundamental truth concerning all life on earth requires a range of facts and evidence drawn from every part of the organic world. The scope of the evidence must be commensurate with the scope of the principle it supports — and evolution is one of the fundamental integrating principles of all biology.

To prove his theory, Darwin assembled and organized “long catalogues of facts.”30 He gathered evidence from all corners of the plant and animal kingdoms, and from all corners of the globe. He had correspondents all over the world who sent him specimens and answered questions on local flora and fauna. He drew on the most obvious and the most obscure facts, spanning all branches of life’s family tree — from the smallest, microscopic organisms to the tallest trees and the largest whales, and from as far back in time as the fossil record went in his day.

The Origin of Species offers an impressive survey of the enormous scope and depth of knowledge that Darwin brought to bear on his theory. To get a sense of that scope and depth, consider the following brief laundry list of some of the kinds of facts he refers to in the book. At various points he bases arguments on, or draws conclusions from, facts concerning: the relative weights of the wing and leg bones in domestic versus wild ducks;31 the fertility via self-fertilization of numerous species of hermaphrodite flower;32 the differences in the method that different species of honeybee use in constructing their hives;33 the sexual relations of snails and of earthworms;34 the number of feathers in the tails of various breeds of domesticated pigeons, followed immediately in the same paragraph by observations on the root stems of different varieties of turnip and rutabaga;35 the slave-making instincts of different species of ant36; the differences in the marine faunas of the eastern and western shores of South and Central America, which have “hardly a fish, shell, or crab in common”;37 the hooks on the ends of the branches of a species of bamboo in the Malay Archipelago;38 the similarities in the embryos of a whole range of vertebrate animals, including birds, reptiles, and mammals;39 the absence on remote oceanic islands of all mammals except bats, which can fly;40 the rules governing the intercrossing of different varieties of cabbage, radish, and onion41; the reappearance of ancestral stripes on various breeds of horse, ass, and zebra.42

One could keep going with this list — and going and going. But the point should be clear. By the time Darwin published the Origin, he had assembled, organized, reflected on, and digested a vast body of factual evidence, and he had integrated that body of evidence into a fundamental principle of nature.

Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 and spent the rest of his life continuing to explore the foundations and the implications of his theory. The list of books that he wrote after the Origin reveals that although he wrote on a broad range of biological topics, all of his works have some bearing on evolution. For example, his 1862 book on orchids (On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects) grew directly out of his attempt to understand complex, interrelated adaptations such as the shape of the flower and the behavior of the insects that fertilize it — and why these would have arisen together by natural selection. His 1868 book on domesticated plants and animals (The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication) was the fruit of his labors in the pigeon clubs and barnyards. His 1871 book, The Descent of Man, and selection in Relation to Sex, was his application of his theory to human evolution. And so on.

Even his last book in 1881, which explains the work of earthworms in reconstituting the soil, is relevant to evolution insofar as it addresses the power of small effects, accumulated over time, to bring about important changes.

Having explored Darwin’s life and work, and the stages by which he discovered and painstakingly validated the theory of evolution, one can readily see how unjust is the accusation that Darwin was an armchair theorist indulging in baseless speculation.

It is notable that Darwin himself anticipated that accusation and answered it in his introduction to The Origin of Species. With his characteristic understatement and modesty, Darwin described his years of painstaking work developing his theory and then expressed the hope that his readers would not think he was too quick to accept his conclusions.

When on board H.M.S. “Beagle” as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species — that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I have given them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.43

Indeed, he was not hasty.

And as careful as he was about assessing the status of his work, when he finally became convinced that his theory was true he was confident in expressing that conviction. By the time Darwin published his theory he was certain of its validity; he was, as he put it, “thoroughly convinced” by the vast body of evidence he had accumulated “that species have changed, and are still slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favorable variations.”44

Today, 160 years after the publication of Origin of Species, the truth of Darwin’s conclusions is rationally indisputable. Darwin’s discoveries, as well as discoveries that were unimaginable in Darwin’s day (such as those concerning the genetic mechanism of heredity and the structure and properties of DNA), have all been integrated into evolutionary theory and further attest to its validity.

Despite the fervent wishes of creationists, the facts leave no room for believing that evolution is “just a theory” or that Darwin was “just a theorist.” On the contrary, the evidence demonstrates that Darwin was the quintessential hands-on scientist — and that his theory is true.45