80. Knowing Myself and Earning Autonomy

80

ANNE WORTHAM

KNOWING MYSELFAND EARNING AUTONOMY

SINCE I AM BLACK AND GREW UP IN segregated Jackson, Tennessee, attended college at the famous Tuskegee Institute, and was in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, one might have expected me to join 250,000 people participating in The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Instead, having just completed my part time job at the Peace Corps headquarters, I was leaving the city, to visit my family in Tennessee before reporting to Syracuse University for training as a Peace Corps teacher in Tanzania, East Africa. Despite my landlady’s insistence that I delay my departure (“Everybody is going to the March”), I just couldn’t overcome my reasons for skipping the historical rally at the Lincoln Memorial, which is known more for Martin Luther King’s famous speech than for its welfare statist demands for what amounted to democratic socialism. First, I was suspicious of mass collective action in general. In 1960, when the sit-in movement, led by students at black colleges, spread to more than 55 cities in 13 states, I witnessed a herd mentality at the campus rallies at my alma mater Tuskegee Institute that was disconcerting and scary. Secondly, although I didn’t then know how to analyze the civil rights movement’s message, I thought its leaders were unjust to demand antidiscrimination legislation that assumed the collective guilt of whites. I also questioned the movement’s approach to the legal redress of private racial discrimination.

I thought the better way to end racism was with the approach of the intergroup relations movement that preceded the protest movement but was still active. Its emphasis was not on government imposed racial equality, but on the promotion of interracial understanding and cooperation, and the reduction of racial tension and conflict through communication and interracial and transcultural activities such as interfaith events, summer camps and international activities. One such organization was the interracial Intercollegiate Council on Campus Life that I had been a member of. Another was Operation Crossroads Africa, an international student project founded by a black minister in 1957, after which the Peace Corps was modeled. In the summer of 1962 I participated as part of an interracial group of 10 Americans and 2 Canadians who were joined by as many Ethiopian college students in adding a classroom to a village school in northern Ethiopia.

It was in the spirit of interracial fellowship that a fellow Crossroader from Wesleyan University-Connecticut and I convinced our universities to sponsor a Tuskegee-Wesleyan Student Exchange Program that enabled students from the respective universities to participate in week-long visits with each other’s student bodies. In 1963 eighteen Wesmen and a dozen Tuskegeeans traded places for a week at a time. According to the Wesleyan Olla Podrida: “Tuskegee offered the Wesleyan student the opportunity of breaking from his New England ivy-tinged grind for a week to . . . catch the mood of revolution which underlies the lethargic appearance of today’s South. To the Northern white student who has assumed the civil rights problem as one of his own concerns, a trip to Alabama . . . becomes a trip into a country on the eve of revolution. . . .”

Although these and other interracial and transcultural experiences broadened my horizons and expanded my knowledge, those benefits were offset by having to deal with the strange collective guilt that whites of my generation had inculcated. I was baffled by their eagerness to extend to all blacks through me an unwarranted level of esteem, a version of what Jim Sleeper calls “liberal racism.” Although I agreed with them that our friendship and cooperation illustrated what was possible between the races, I could not accept their tendency to view themselves and me as embodiments of our respective racial groups. The interaction script was always the same: I was to play the role of the oppressed bearing scars of slavery and racism; my counterpart played the part of the enlightened liberator bearing the guilt of the oppressor, and seeking the relief of “your people” while being absolved by me of sins I did not believe were theirs to claim. It was bewildering at first, but during the successive years that I continued to associate with whites, I learned how to respond to such collectivistic altruism.

Earlier that summer I wrote in an essay that although the world was paying tribute to the Negro, “and this [racial] aspect of my being is constantly being thrown at me, . . . I cannot respond; I cannot feel what they [other Negroes] feel. . . . I do not feel unequal . . . I cannot make my heart hate [all] whites . . . I can feel sadness . . . I cannot be a part of them.” Clearly I needed help in articulating my misgivings, and in how to cope with being a dissenter from the general consensus. I needed to know who I was, and who “they” were.

Seventeen years later in a graduate school paper on the social and political context and meaning of black identification, I was able to confidently argue that since there is no singular consciousness or mind, there is no collective identity such as black identity. “When a group of individuals is guided by a shared frame of reference the result is group identification. It is in this broadest sense that identity as culture is socially bestowed. . . . But an individual’s self-identity—his personality and character—may or may not be congruous with the identification of the group of which he is a member.”

How did I develop intellectually from the confusion and unhappiness of my early years to the confident clarity of 1980? The idea of socially-bestowed identity came from my professor Peter L. Berger who viewed all socially-assigned identities as exercises in “bad faith.” I would not have fully comprehended Berger’s argument had I not understood its source in existentialism and, more importantly, recognized his use of “bad faith” referring to the substitution of the man-made for the metaphysical. I learned the latter from Ayn Rand whose works I encountered while serving in the Peace Corps. Ironically, Rand would have condemned my Peace Corps affiliation. “Those selfless little altruists of the Peace Corps who play the role of big shots in the jungle, at taxpayers expense,” is how she characterized the volunteers in a 1962 column. In fact it was not selflessness that motivated me, but the desire to expand my overseas experience and continue teaching myself French to prepare for a graduate program in international relations I had been admitted to at George Washington University. But by the end of my tour, I agreed that most of my fellow volunteers were selfless altruists whose patronizing benevolence I found reprehensible, and abandoned my plans for a career in international relations.

My fateful encounter with Ayn Rand came in 1964, midway into the first year of my Peace Corps tour. A fellow volunteer had read her interview in the March issue of Playboy, and recommended that I read it because, he said, my “weird” ideas sounded a lot like hers. I didn’t understand much of the approach in Rand’s comments, but I recall being struck by her observations about the debasing features of altruism—especially her example of Christianity as based on the crucifixion of its most virtuous and perfect embodiment.

Although my lack of knowledge and experience stymied my effort to see through the clouded lens of my religious upbringing and grasp the profundity of Rand’s analysis, I was unsettled enough in my thinking to take note of her indictment. Some months later while on vacation in Kampala, Uganda, we found a used paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged at a rummage shop; still later the British manager of a tea plantation gave me his unread paperback of The Fountainhead.

I identified immediately with the protagonist in The Fountainhead and was so impressed by Rand’s characterization of his individualism that I wrote to the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) in New York for copies of the NBI lectures that were advertised on the cover of the book. In his reply the NBI manager informed me that the lecture series was not available in print, and sent brochures that described the Institute’s offerings, including books that could be purchased from NBI’s Book Service. He also wrote: “I am somewhat startled by your interest in the Peace Corps and in Objectivism. If you have understood Miss Rand’s books, I am sure you will understand the contradiction.” I did understand, and attempted to resign from the Peace Corps, but was told that if I left before the end of my tour, I would have to finance my return to the U.S. I had no choice but to stay.

Despite the manager’s castigation, I ordered pamphlets by Rand, hardbacks of her 4 novels, For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, NBI’s Objectivist Newsletter, Ludwig von Mises’s Anti-Capitalist Mentality, John Herman Randall’s Aristotle, Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis, and others. With these works, I began an adventure of intellectual expansion that continues to this day. I remember reading Anthem and being brought to tears by a mixture of joyous confirmation and indignation and sadness for the state of the world. The empirical evidence of John Galt’s speech in Atlas and Mises’s Anti-Capitalistic Mentality was all around me; I had but to look out my window and see the consequences of collectivism in the lives of Tanzanian peasants.

A very important ingredient, in the form of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, was also thrown into my intellectual cauldron. The book was in our Peace Corps-issued library, and I became interested in it when I read Rand’s endorsement of Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in the Objectivist Newsletter. His criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, and Rand’s essays, “Collectivized Rights” and “Man’s Rights” spoke as clearly to me as the first paragraphs of The Fountainhead had. Rand’s natural law defense of individual rights confirmed my misgivings about the civil rights movement and gave me the language of freedom and justice with which to integrate my questions about civil rights policy into a coherent perspective.

It is difficult to explain what it meant to be able to conceptualize at last what I had been staring at both internally and externally since my college days! I felt the glorious and ennobling torment of self-liberation that Frederick Douglass said he knew upon teaching himself to read. He said he sometimes felt knowledge to be a curse rather than a blessing, and almost envied his fellow-slaves for their stupidity. Now that he was free from ignorance, his soul was ever wakeful and he could not cease thinking of his condition. Douglass eventually fled his enslavement, but fortunately, I had only to extract my mind from the perplexities of contradictions and false premises.

Let me pause to note that the roots of my quandary over civil rights issues and my affinity for the analyses of Rand and Mises were located in the circumstances of my family background and the teachings of my father. Born in 1941, I was the first of five children born to Bernice and Johnny Wortham, a high-school educated housewife who had studied Latin in school and wrote religious poetry, and a self-taught laborer who later became a self-employed traveling salesman and self-ordained minister. Our family was not poor because, despite rationing during the war, my father always had a job, and the postwar economy was fairly good, so an industrious family could manage quite well. My Mom died in 1952 at age 32 when I was almost 11 years old. Fearing that my 35-year-old father would saddle us with a stepmother, I insisted that I could help him take care of my sister and three brothers, the youngest of whom was 3 years old. My confidence came from the fact that my mother had taught me homemaking skills that women of that time were expected to teach their daughters. My Dad’s great gift to me was that he believed me, so I became the other head of our family and remained so even after he remarried twenty years later to a young woman 20 years his junior and began a second family.

Ours was a very religious home organized around what conservatives refer to as “family values.” Before my mother died, every Thursday night after supper we went to the living room (that was otherwise off limits) where my Dad instructed us in what he, my mother and God expected of us. He expected us to be “self-supporting, independent, law-abiding citizens.” God’s expectations were spelled out in the Ten Commandments, as well as in various verses he read of Paul’s epistles to the Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians. He mixed religious rules with secular expectations regarding the devotion to productivity that were similar to the moral sayings of Benjamin Franklin that Max Weber found so exemplary of the “spirit of capitalism.” Not knowing that his were the words of Franklin, he repeatedly reminded us that “time is money.” Franklin wrote that “For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty.” In my father’s words Franklin’s insight became: “There’s no substitute for a good reputation,” and “Remember, your record follows you.” Like Franklin he believed that to tend one’s money was also to tend one’s soul, and thereby cleverly evaded the traditional Christian dogma that money is the root of all evil. When they were old enough he made my brothers work as newspaper boys so they would “learn how a dollar is made.” Like the Puritans he viewed work as a moral principle that tied men to spiritual salvation; a person’s work was his “calling” and hard work, commitment to excellence, and good works were signs of inner grace. Looking back, I see that in my Dad’s work habits I was witnessing the farmer’s ethic of deferred gratification, the craftsman’s ethic of self-sufficiency, and the entrepreneur’s ethic of market success.

I vividly remember his suspicions of government and warnings to keep Uncle Sam out of our back pockets. He included racial segregation and discrimination among the sins of our society, but he spoke little of that. The only experience of racism he shared was the refusal of the manager of the Kroger store where he worked as custodian to allow him to take a company exam for promotion to a job in the produce section. The story was important because he had to explain to us why he was leaving the job to start his own business. My only memory of his reference to “White folks” as such was when he told my sister and me that we must not end up marrying for security or working in a white woman’s kitchen, even as (much to his chagrin) I did domestic work on Saturdays to earn spending money. He might have made other references, but whites were not the kitchen-table point of reference for our family, something I didn’t become aware of until I heard my college classmates talk about their negative perceptions of whites, and I had little to contribute.

As it turned out the power of Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy was that the ideas and values they imparted fell on extremely fertile ground that had been cultivated not only with the teachings and examples of my father. As I document in my article, “Behind the Walls of Segregation: Playing Cowboys,” I was also greatly influenced by the Western hero as portrayed in radio, television, movies, and comic books of the 40s and 50s. Western cowboy and lawmen heroes, first on radio and later on television, rode into my imagination as embodiments of a mixture of moral strength and practical savvy to overcome injustice, solve social dilemmas, and face up to danger; they portrayed gallantry, dedication to purpose, hard work, individuality, and self-reliance. Since I wanted to grow up to be like the western hero, it did not take a great leap of imagination to experience immediate affinity with Randian heroes.

The unsavory baggage I brought to my encounter with Rand was primarily religious. Thus, one of the first things I did after reading her works was to write alternatives to each of the 107 verses of the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5–7). A couple of years after my return to the United States, I self-published it as a booklet under the title, An Answer For Man. It was the first of many of my essays motivated by my policy that if I disagreed with an idea, I was obliged to know why and produce an alternative idea.

When I first read the title of Ayn Rand’s column, “Check Your Premises,” in the Objectivist Newsletter, I reacted defensively to her stern admonition as though it were a rebuke of Original Sin. It was all I could do to avoid turning errors of knowledge and judgment into moral self-indictments. However, I came to see checking one’s premises as the all-important vigilance that is essential not only for the maintenance of psycho-intellectual autonomy but for the preservation of political liberty.

Another order I gave to myself which became the guiding principle of my teaching is: “Know What you Are Talking About!!!” I wrote those words in the margin of page 91 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I doubt I would have moved beyond the lowest level of intellectual independence without an understanding of this demanding intellectual responsibility. Yet my understanding would hardly have been actualized were it not for my study of Nathaniel Branden’s extension of Objectivism into his theory of biocentric psychology in The Psychology of Self-Esteem. While Rand taught me how to think, and how to arrive at empirical and moral judgments, Branden taught me how to be myself. From his analysis I learned that I could not know myself as a unique personality and character until I understood the cognitive, emotional, moral and behavioral dimensions of the human self.

Synthesizing the thought of Rand and Branden gave me conceptual tools with which to interpret and evaluate the public discourse and events of the times. My first critique of the collectivist assumptions of civil rights policy was published in the article, “Individualism Versus Racism,” in the January 1966 issue of The Freeman. That was followed by several articles in The Freeman and Reason that I wrote while I worked as an editorial researcher for such media organizations as Esquire magazine, NBC News’ “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” ABC Radio News, and King Features Syndicate. For a few months I even delivered a five-minute news commentary on WNYU, New York University’s student radio station. My most extensive written application of their ideas occurs in my book, The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness (1981). Using Branden’s typologies of the social metaphysician, I showed how race and ethnic consciousness and other types of subjective responses to interracial contact and conflict are transformed into political strategies and policies that undermine intellectual independence, individual rights, and economic and political freedom. However, writing the book made me increasingly aware of the inadequacy of relying primarily on philosophy in general and Objectivism in particular for generating questions and explanations regarding the structure and dynamics of social and cultural phenomena. It was one thing to understand the value judgments and theories of reality and knowledge underlying social action and cultural trends that undermine rationality, individuality, limited government and a free economic system; it was quite another to understand how this activity is organized and legitimated into systems of social interaction, from the level of interpersonal relations to societal systems of politics and economics. To achieve the latter, after fourteen years away from academia, I enrolled in Boston College to pursue a doctoral degree in sociology.

It was no easy ride to partake of a discipline that emerged as a conservative reaction to the Enlightenment and whose primary intellectual history has been devoted to defining human nature out of explanations of human behavior. Yet, despite sociology’s serious flaws, that it shared with other social sciences, its various perspectives enabled me to see more clearly the historical, cultural, and structural origins of competing worldviews, theories and social practices. I also attained a deeper and more critical understanding of Ayn Rand’s depiction of the relation of the individual to society and her account of the emergence of modern civilization and trends in societal evolution. Almost every paper I wrote for graduate courses involved first writing about the subject from a philosophical perspective, then producing a sociological analysis for the submitted paper. This involved moving beyond Objectivism to the works of thinkers like Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Robert Nisbet, David Riesman, Peter Berger. Rothbard’s book Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (1974) and his monograph Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1979) were just what I needed. Tibor Machan’s Human Rights and Human Liberties, Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology and Social Construction of Reality, Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition, are just a few of the works I tapped into as I grappled with the ideas of classical and contemporary sociologists. The work that has had the greatest influence on my conception of American history is Arthur Ekirch’s The Decline of American Liberalism.

My articles and essays introduced me to libertarians, conservatives and objectivists, among whom I found friends and supporters without whose help and encouragement I would have had no academic career. Leonard Read and Paul Poirot welcomed me to pages of The Freeman; so too did the editors of Reason. Rothbard encouraged my return to graduate school, and thought my book “can make a real contribution, since you are the only articulate black individualist around today.” In his response to an outline of the book, Roger Lea McBride, then the 1976 Libertarian Party presidential candidate, noted my intellectual growth: “From looking at your earlier pieces in The Freeman, I would say that you have been growing toward a vitally needed better and fuller statement . . .” Another supporter, columnist John Chamberlain called the book “her declaration of independence.” During my second year of graduate school, I was invited to my first Liberty Fund seminar. Participating in the seminars, sometimes as the only female in attendance, was a much needed source of sustenance as I wended my way through the treacherous academic world during and after graduate school. My greatest benefactor was businessman, economic journalist, and speechwriter George Koether who had been a member of the original Ludwig von Mises circle in America. In his determination to see that I completed my graduate studies, George solicited donors around the country to contribute to fellowships that were awarded to me through an assortment of libertarian foundations and institutes.

The addition of libertarian influences and associations, and persistent queries from academic opponents about my views made it necessary to be clear in my own mind where I stood on the ideological spectrum. As it was necessary to know myself vis-à-vis those who share my racial and gender categories, so it was to know my worldview vis-à-vis those who share my ideology of classical liberalism. Of the two major two variants of classical liberalism, I am informed by individualist or natural rights liberalism which defends liberty as the requirement of human nature, in contrast to utilitarian liberalism which does so on the basis of liberty’s utility for the common good. Among the natural rights liberals I am a proponent of limited government rather than anarcho-capitalism. Although I find much that is valuable in the analyses of classical-liberal economists associated with the Austrian School, public choice theory, and the Chicago School, I consider their value-free interpretations and conclusions regarding political economy in juxtaposition to my natural rights/normative perspective.

I never thought of myself as an Objectivist. My association with objectivists was limited to attending a few NBI lectures held in New York City. I didn’t like Rand’s rudeness toward people in the audience when they asked questions. She seemed cold, dogmatic, authoritarian, and lacking the benevolent sense of life that she wrote so eloquently about. As a member of the audience I felt I was in a congregation of Atlas Shrugged-quoting true believers who were more interested in quoting chapter and verse of Rand’s novels than thinking for themselves. I stopped attending the lectures and went my own way, as it were.

The last time I saw Rand was in 1978 at her Ford Hall Forum lecture at Northeastern University in Boston. During the question and answer period following the lecture, Rand was asked to comment on why there were so few blacks in the audience. She was rightfully outraged by the question, but thought her answer was inadequate. In an article entitled “Individualism: For Whites Only?,” I wrote: “It has indeed, as Rand says, been harder for blacks (as a group) to preserve their dignity in a system that has denied or restricted their freedom than it has been for groups who, at the very least, have been guaranteed suffrage. But doesn’t the philosophy of individualism rest on man’s capacity to resist or transcend the social influences of a given historical era or of a given culture? The same logic that supports the possibility of an Ayn Rand rising out of post-Czarist Russia also accounts for the possibility of a Frederick Douglass rising out of the institution of slavery or an Anne Wortham rising out of segregationist Tennessee.”

Freedom is not free, and neither is its defense, as I learned most brutally when I began my search for a university position in 1982. With the exception of Peter Berger, my professors exerted little effort on my behalf in the belief that as a “two-fer,” possessing the categories of black and female, I would have no difficulty finding a position. Little did they know. The doctoral degree certified my eligibility, but I was tainted by negative reviews of The Other Side of Racism in which I defended the property rights of Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox who in 1964 said that he would close his restaurant rather than serve blacks, and 15 years of essays invoking the perspective of natural rights liberalism. The path leading to an academic career was a trail of ideological prejudice, stigmatization, ridicule and ostracism.

Evolving toward autonomy—thinking in principles and living by one’s own independent rational reflection and critical judgment—is not done in isolation from others. Neither is striving for success in one’s calling. Without my father, Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden I would not have come within a foot of autonomy. Without my many friends among defenders of liberty there would be no career in defense of liberty, and I would not be included in this book. I have a lot of woulda-coulda-shouldas and hope-tos left on my plate, but I have no doubt about my purpose. It is and always will be the defense of liberty.

Anne Wortham is associate professor of sociology at Illinois State University and visiting scholar at the Hoover Institutution.