When I entered college, after a four year stint in the US Air Force, I
discovered that a great many intelligent people commit what is called the
genetic fallacy. As the entry in Wikipedia puts it, this fallacy is
committed when "a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or
someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This
overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically
transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context."
Whenever I would voice any of my views about politics, economics, child
rearing or whatever, these folks explained it away by my origins, my
having been born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, then a Soviet
(communist) satellite. Everything I thought and said was deemed to have
been caused by my background.
This approach to understanding what people think and do has one very
serious problem: the person's views who is doing the explaining would then
also be subject to such an explanation; indeed, the explanation would have
to be considered caused by that person's background. In the 20th century
such a way of coming to understand people became very popular, mainly
because how so many people were taken by Sigmund Freud's doctrine of
unconscious motivation. By Freud's account, most of what we think and do
is so motivated and our explicit convictions and claims to understanding
can be pretty much dismissed. Notice how this undermines Freud's own
views!
I always had personal misgivings about having my own ideas treated along
these lines since they made my own thinking, reasoning, research and such
all irrelevant--all that counts is where I was brought up and by whom. No
one need actually come to terms even with any arguments I put forward
since they have no impact on my thinking and conduct. (Karl Marx had a
similar idea with his economic determinism according to which what people
think is due to the economic circumstances in which they live! Once again,
this would seem to undermine his own ideas but Marx was at least aware of
this and tried hard to exempt himself by claiming that unlike all others,
he had a proper methodology for figuring things out which made him immune
to economic determinism.)
When I got to graduate school I read a wonderful book by Leo Strauss,
Natural Right and History (U. of Chicago, 1953), which fully supported my
own rejection of any of the many uses of the genetic fallacy. Strauss
found it very objectionable that so many historians of ideas would study
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and most other major
philosophers by attributing their views to the environmental influences on
them. Sure, at times this is a valid point to make but it needs showing in
each particular case, not simply assumed about everybody.
In 1962, before I entered college, I had a half hour meeting with the
novelist philosopher Ayn Rand whose novels I encountered in the Air Force
and liked a lot and I said to her something like, "Maybe the reason I like
your books so much is that like you, I too escaped to the West from a
communist country." Rand very politely objected saying, in effect, her
novels and the ideas in them spring mainly from her mind and her careful
reflections, not from her environment. She observed that her aim is to
make points that hold for human beings, not just for her and others who
escaped from tyrannies.
Over the last couple or so decades several biographies have appeared about
Ayn Rand. The one that I think largely respects Rand's and Strauss's
points about how to understand a thinker is Barbara Branden's The Passion
of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1986). The other two, one by Dr. Chris Matthew
Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical (Penn State University Press,
1995), and the just completed Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday,
2009), by Anne C. Heller, both give an account of Rand's life and thinking
mostly by reference to her history--her childhood circumstances and
upbringing.
It seems, however, that these authors do not fully appreciate that if they
deal with Ayn Rand this way, they, too, invite being so treated--what
Sciabarra and Heller say can then be simply explained away as coming from
their own upbringing. And that means the issue of whether what they say is
true is moot.
I hope that someone outside her own circle of admirers would someday write
a book about Ayn Rand that approaches her in her own terms--examining
whether her ideas are sound, not what caused them.
