Return of the Primitive by Ayn Rand

Author:Ayn Rand [Rand, Ayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, United States, Philosophy, Technology & Engineering, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Modern, History & Surveys, Social Aspects, Conservatism & Liberalism
ISBN: 9780452011847
Publisher: Plume
Published: 1984-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

(July-August 1971)

THE POLITICS

The Left: Old and New

If you happened to see Sign of the Pagan, a very bad movie recently shown on television, dealing with Attila’s invasion of Europe, you may have noticed that Attila kept an astrologer by his side, as his only adviser, and consulted him before undertaking every bloody new campaign. You may have felt a touch of superiority (which Western man took fifteen centuries to earn), best expressed by the sentence: “It can’t happen now.” You may have regarded the reliance on astrology as crude, primitive or amusing, but quite appropriate to Attila; besides, he had nothing but clubs and swords to devastate the world with.

Would you find it amusing if you saw the same Attila balancing a nuclear bomb in the palm of his hand and consulting the astrologer on whether to toss it?

Well, you can see it or, rather, you can hear it being announced in advance and welcomed, not in the scriptures of the Huns, but in a magazine regarded as safely reputable, read by respectable commuters of the somewhat conservative type—not in A.D. 450, but in Time magazine on December 19, 1969.

A piece entitled “The Next Decade: A Search for Goals” begins by invoking the sanction of astrology, as justification for its prophecies about the coming decade. The present motion of the planet Neptune, it seems, is a “sign of idealism and spiritual values,” which will work “a profound change” in people’s ways of thinking and acting.

“Just possibly,” declares—no, not Attila’s adviser, but Time magazine, “the astrologers may be proved right.... In the long run, this decade and the next may well constitute an historical era of transition, like that which followed the Middle Ages and preceded the Renaissance.

“The veneration of rationality was the special myth of modern man. The world view created by the enthronement of reason included a universal belief in individualism and competition; now that myth is dying. Faith in science and technology has given way to fear of their consequences ... The cultural revolution of the ‘60s that emphasized Dionysian rather than Apollonian virtues will continue into the ’70s.”

Nothing but astrology could justify a statement of this kind. It is embarrassing to have to comment on it. But for the benefit of the very young, I will point out a few things that should be almost self-evident.

The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man’s mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism—a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.

I have no way of knowing whether Time’s statement came from ignorance or worse. I know only that when I advocate the supremacy of reason, I do not equate it with a historical period exemplifying its opposite. But this is an Apollonian, not a Dionysian, virtue.

There is one element of truth in that quotation

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