"Blinded By Religion" 

Getting It Right
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Regnery Publishing Inc.  305 pp 

Reviewed By Jeff Kiviat

In Getting it Right, William F. Buckley Jr. gives us his version of the history of the Conservative movement from 1956 through 1966.  He does it in the form of a historical novel.  As Buckley sees it, a major problem for conservatism in that period was the need to fend off incursions by two extreme wings of the movement:  the John Birch Society and the Objectivists.  To show how conservatives succeeded in doing this, he creates fictional characters representing each wing, and follows them through the period. 

Woody Raynor represents the John Birch society.  As a young Mormon on a mission in Austria, he becomes peripherally involved in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and is wounded.  This primes him for discovering the very anti-communist John Birch society.  Leonora Goldstein represents Objectivism.  Her father, a longshoreman, was killed in a turf war by Communist longshoremen.  A friend introduces her to Ayn Rand's writings at the time of the Hungarian uprising.

The two meet at the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom, in Sharon, Connecticut, at the Buckley home.  Their relationship becomes intimate, and we get to see them debate their differing philosophies.  In the end, they both abandon their philosophies in favor of traditional conservatism.

In the preface, Buckley makes the following assertion: 

Liberties are taken in chronology, and of course, as is to be expected in novels, thoughts and sentences are given to individuals which, however true they are to character, were not actually recorded.  But there is no misrepresentation in this novel, certainly none intended, and to the best of my knowledge, none crept in…. Not one word is attributed to any public declaration by Robert Welch or other representative of the John Birch Society that wasn't actually spoken or written by them. This is so also of Ayn Rand, respecting her thought and writing.   p. vii (emphasis added)

With respect to the Objectivist portion of the book, Buckley fails to meet the standard he has set.  Let’s begin by looking at the character of Leonora Goldstein.  When most people discover Objectivism, they read one or more of Ayn Rand’s books, and have an experience akin to that of the person in Plato’s allegory of the cave.  This person has been looking at shadows on the wall for his entire life.  Then someone brings him out of the cave, into the light.   Suddenly, everything is sharper, brighter and in color.  We don’t see anything like this in the book.  Leonora reads ‘something’ by Rand, and the next thing we know, she’s hired to work as a researcher for Barbara Branden.  Despite this position, which lets her routinely attend NBI lectures, her understanding of Objectivism is pitifully poor, as we will see shortly.  But, at least, that may explain how she could fall in love with a Bircher.

Some time after the Kennedy assassination, Leonora discusses altruism with Woody and Marvin Liebman.  Here is an excerpt from the conversation:

Marvin: "Straighten me out Lee on your objectivist objections to altruism.  I mean, don't we all do things for others?"

Lee: "…(people) think it means I'm opposed to kindness, charity, benevolence and respect for the rights of others – and yet altruism means none of these things."

Marvin: "So, if you do good things for others, then you're not an altruist?"

Lee: "Not unless the sacrifice you make for others means surrendering yourself, abandoning the kind of self-fulfillment that is the key to true liberty"

Woody: talks about all the sacrifices Marvin has made in his life

Lee: "As long as someone feels he is doing what he wants to do, then he isn't an altruist." p. 237  (emphasis added)

So, Lee does not know the difference between rational self-interest and psychological egoism; she’s clueless about what distinguishes Objectivism from any other sort of egoism.  And I would like to know where, in the Objectivist corpus, Lee might have gotten the idea that self-fulfillment is the key to true liberty.  It sounds like something out of a new age pop psychology book.   At this point, the reader might hope that other characters will provide an accurate representation of Objectivism.   That would be a forlorn hope.  Let’s take a look at some of his treatment of Ayn Rand.

When we first meet Rand, she’s at her desk thinking.  Let’s listen to some of her thoughts:

I saw Barbara wince when I rebuked that stupid student.  Will she reproach me tomorrow?  I can tell when she is offended.  She doesn't have to say so.  My eyes are all-seeing, my ears all-hearing.  Rand snuffed out a cigarette and let a half smile come to her face.  Only God could reproach Ayn Rand, and He does not exist.  Aristotle might have tried it, but it would have been presumptuous, because Aristotle didn't get it all correct, wandering off into cosmology, inquiring into prime movers, etc." p.39 (emphasis added)

Buckley is apparently unaware that the fallibility of reason is a fundamental precept of Objectivism.  Indeed, that fallibility is what explains man’s need for philosophy.  Rand would never think, “my eyes are all seeing, my ears all hearing.”  And anyone well read in the oeuvre of Ayn Rand would know of the high regard in which she holds Aristotle.  It is not likely that she would be disrespectful toward him in her thoughts.  Sometime later, at an NBI lecture, Rand is present to answer questions:

Questioner:  “Miss Rand, I stumbled upon Atlas Shrugged in a reading list I was given for a class at school and was greatly taken with it.  Is it safe to assume you have another novel in the works?”

Rand:  “My books are not written merely for enjoyment.  They are catalysts for societal change.”  P. 99

Actually, Rand has repeatedly asserted that the purpose of her novels is to portray the ideal man.   Creating a new philosophy turned out to be a necessary part of that, but was never the purpose of her fiction writing. 

Buckley also uses other characters to provide a distorted view of Objectivism.  After attending an NBI lecture, Woody meets with a Princeton academic, Theo Romney, who opines: “The Objectivists pose a special challenge.  Because if they succeed in implanting their creed on the Republican Party, it becomes a vessel for …a kind of misanthropic anarchy.  The GOP has to beat a path to a wholesome conservatism, and that isn’t helped by anything I’ve read by Ayn Rand.”  P. 101 (emphasis added)  What in the world is he talking about here?  Rand was utterly opposed to political anarchy.  Perhaps Buckley is revealing his view that if you don’t accept revealed morality, then you believe that ‘anything goes’ in ethics. Yet, it is Objectivism that falsifies that belief.  To call Objectivism misanthropic is, of course, absurd.  Certainly Rand painted a negative picture of some people, i.e. those who rejected reason, but they don’t represent mankind.

At a meeting of the ‘collective,’ the narrator provides us with a particularly revealing misrepresentation of Objectivism:

Although most of the collective were ethnically Jewish, they scorned the Torah as they did Christianity, if not so comprehensively, Judaism being focused more on life on earth than on afterlife.  But Judaism, like all religions in objectivist terminology, was nothing more than superstition.  A first axiom of objectivism was the nonobjective nature of religion. P. 59 

One has to wonder where the author’s understanding of Objectivism comes from.  There are some important axioms in Objectivism, but the one he cites is definitely not one of them.  This passage is illustrative of Buckley’s obsession with religion.  There are so many religious allusions by and about the ‘Objectivists’ in this book, that the reader is led to believe that opposing religion was Rand’s primary focus.  Her actual views on religion are expressed succinctly in a letter to a Catholic priest:

I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion.  I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy."  Letters of Ayn Rand, March 20, 1965

You will recall that in the preface, Buckley said, “liberties are taken in chronology.”  Doing so can be innocuous, but in this case it is used to substantively distort history and the character of Ayn Rand.  In the book, Buckley shows the Rand-Branden affair to be ongoing, well before permission was sought from their respective spouses.  But as Bob Bidinotto notes:  “All published accounts of that relationship consistently report that the pair first sought the permission of their respective spouses, and that the affair was not launched until five months later.” [1]  Was this an innocent change to enhance the plot of the book?  As the book has no plot, the answer must be no.  I think that this is just another way for Buckley to attack Ayn Rand.

In part, this book is an ad hominem attack on Ayn Rand and her philosophy.  Buckley portrays her as dishonest (via the affair), rude and an egomaniac.  We’re supposed to think:  ‘If Ayn Rand behaves this way, her philosophy must be wrong.’  I’ve read and listened to William F. Buckley quite a bit.   He knows this is fallacious reasoning.   But more important, Buckley has misrepresented the philosophy of Objectivism.  I can’t know if that is intentional, but I strongly suspect that it is not.   I think he is like a horse with blinders on, and the blinders are his religious faith.  There is no attempt in this book to come to grips with any actual objectivist arguments.  The attempt would probably be too painful for William F. Buckley, Jr.

I hope that this book doesn’t turn readers off to the historical fiction genre.   Historical fiction at its best makes for great reading and imparts real knowledge in a memorable way.  That’s because memory is enhanced when new information comes with emotional content and when it can be logically connected to already-established knowledge.  Good historical fiction does both.  Of course, historical fiction must be read critically, but the same is true for ordinary history.  There are, after all, some pretty poor history books out there, e.g. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  To do good historical fiction, the writer needs to be objective.  In the case of Getting It Right, there are a couple of red flags indicating that the author is not.  For one thing, he’s writing about history in which he played a role.  Indeed, he has a minor part in the book.  Even more significant, Buckley is known to despise Ayn Rand.  Not only did he publish the notorious review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers, but, when Rand died, he used two of his columns to viciously attack her.  So, it should be no surprise that this book gives us a distorted, unrecognizable picture of Objectivism.  There is much good historical fiction out there.  You will have to look elsewhere to find it.