“Get the Government Off Our Backs!”

The separation of church and state is a long-standing and much-appreciated (by many, including me) principle in the United States. To be sure, there are some who criticize that principle, often because they don’t understand its true meaning.

Recently I learned that there are also people who advocate the separation of economics and state. Just as the principle of separation of church and state means, among other things, that the state should have no control over religious institutions and activities, the separation of economics and state means primarily that the state should have no control over economic/financial activities.

This seems to be the position of the people in our society, most clearly represented by the Tea Party, who keep exclaiming “get the government off our backs!” It is mainly the federal government they are talking about, and their specific opposition is to taxes and government controls/regulations on anything related to economic matters.

The call for separation of economics and state was a strongly-held position of Russian-American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who has gained a remarkable number of followers through the years. Her name has been heard often this year.

Rand is well known partly because of her two bestselling novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and for the philosophical system she called Objectivism.

I have to admit that I have not read Rand’s novels, and I certainly have not taken the time to listen to the 63-hour (!) “audible audio edition” of her 1957 novel.

But I have read enough about them, and her philosophy, to know her key ideas. And recently June and I watched the movie “The Fountainhead” (1949), for which Rand wrote the screenplay. The next evening we watched the biographical documentary “Ayn Rand: In Her Own Words” (2011).

And then we watched the movie “The Passion of Ayn Rand”(1999), featuring Helen Mirren as Rand and based on the book by Barbara Branden, wife of the young man with whom Rand had a lengthy affair.

The Ayn Rand Center (ARC) is the public policy and outreach division of the Ayn Rand Institute. According to their website, “The Center’s mission is to advance individual rights (the rights of each person to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness) as the moral basis for a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist society.”

This idea of “a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist society” necessitates the separation of economics and the state (government). Such separation may be good (financially beneficial) for people in business and for those who have money (capital). It is not so good for people who are poor, needing help in securing the basic necessities of life.

Since Ayn Rand was an outspoken advocate of selfishness and opponent of altruism, it is disheartening to see how now there are so many, including some top politicians (Congresspersons), who openly advocate her philosophy.

For example, Representative Paul Ryan reportedly requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.”

Doesn’t that kind of thinking lead not only to the separation of economics and state but also, sadly, to the separation of compassion and state?

“Charter for Compassion”

Karen Armstrong, an Englishwoman who was once a Roman Catholic nun, first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, an international best seller. She has written several widely-read books since then.

In 2008 Armstrong (b. 1944) received the $100,000 TED Prize. She used that windfall to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year. (TED, Technology Entertainment and Design, is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.”)

The Charter for Compassion was created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. In November 2009 it was signed by a thousand religious and secular leaders—and now by over 75,000 more people, including me. The charter has been translated into more than thirty languages.

 The Charter’s first (of four) paragraph states:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

That statement, and the paragraphs that follow it, express noble sentiments, indeed. (You can read the whole charter by clicking on this link.)

Armstrong’s most recent book is Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010). On the first page of the Preface, she declares, “One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect.” I certainly agree.

But I also wonder why no mention is made of the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic, about which I posted last time. (Did she need to “re-invent the wheel”?)

Unfortunately, some in our society don’t seem to be much in favor of compassion, including some political leaders. Gov. Perry, for example, criticizes liberals who seek to advance “a radical secular agenda in the name of compassion” (Fed Up! p. 13). Later in the same book he strongly criticizes President Bush’s (W’s) “Compassionate Conservatism” (p. 143).

Ayn Rand, the darling of some prominent politicians today, was no supporter of compassion. And back in 2004, the president of the Ayn Rand Center of Individual Rights, railed against the Bush Administration's war in Iraq for embracing compassion (You can read the article here.)

Armstrong, though, contends that “to wish for your enemy’s well-being and happiness” is “the supreme test of compassion” (p. 185). Loving one’s enemies as one loves oneself sounds like something I have heard somewhere else.

Do those words not apply to nations or to politicians?

Note: For you in the D.C. area, Dr. Armstrong will lead a forum on compassion at Washington National Cathedral on the morning of September 11. For you who live in the (north) Kansas City area, the Vital Conversations book discussion group will be discussing the last half of Dr. Armstrong’s book at their regular monthly meeting (at the Mid-Continent Public Library in Gladstone), from 1:00 to 2:30 on Wednesday, September 14.