Comment by Murray N. Rothbard
retrieved from The Libertarian Forum, VOLUME III, NOS. 6-7 July-August, 1971 in response to LIBERTY: FROM CHRIST TO RAND by Joseph R. Peden

Dr. Warren Carroll's Leap Over the Wall from Randianism to Triumphantist Christianity highlights two important problems that deserve far more attention than they have received from libertarians: the growing problem of defection, and the status of Christianity and the Christian ethic within the movement.

As Professor Peden points out, a major reason for Carroll's defection was his thirst for Instant Victory - a flaw that he shared with all too many libertarians. When that Instant Victory was not forthcoming, Carroll took flight for a retreatist Utopia in Tasmania, and when that proved abortive, abandoned the cause altogether. Why can't libertarians settle down cheerfully to a lifelong struggle for liberty? Carroll says repeatedly that libertarianism offers "no reward along the way", no "reward in the road itself" except for the eventual attainment of liberty. But why not? Why is there not joy in dedication to the advancement of truth, justice, and liberty? The businessman, after all, finds joy in the ceaseless pursuit of profit and growth, the scientist in the endless quest for ever-expanding truth; why may not the libertarian obtain the same from the "long march" toward liberty? Every other "career" offers joys and satisfactions in the functioning of the career itself, and apart from specific achievements emanating from it. Why should the "career" of liberty hold any less excitement and reward for the libertarian?

Carroll does have a small point here, however. In that all too many libertarians have, in their commendable "purism", systematically ruled out any conceivable strategy for even ultimate or eventual victory, By ruling out virtually all tactics except pure education, libertarians have almost doomed themselves to perpetual defeat, which might be enough to discourage even the stoutest of heart. On the contrary, it is precisely in the area of strategy and tactics where the libertarian should be flexible and pragmatic - in contrast to the realm of principle where he should be "doctrinaire" and consistent.

On the whole issue that Carroll raises about the nature of man and his institutions, Carroll is about the one millionth person to totally misinterpret the libertarian view in this area, He states that "all libertarian schools view man as naturally good and naturally rational"; in contrast, I don't know of one that holds such an absurdly naive doctrine, And yet this has been the major charge hurled at us by archists for generations. To set the record straight hopefully for good and all, the libertarian believes, along with everyone else, that man is a mixture of good and evil. What we are trying to do is to eliminate institutions which are inherently evil and thereby provide a legalized, legitimated channel for evil to proceed unchecked in society. There should be nothing very mysterious about that.

This brings me to the whole question of Christianity and the Christian ethic. Not a Christian myself, I have seen for years how Christian libertarians have been abused, badgered, and hectored by militant atheists and presumptuous Randians, and their libertarian bona fides sharply questioned. Being on the whole - perhaps as a result of their Christian training - far nicer people than their tormentors, these Christian libertarians have put up with this shabby treatment with calm and good humor. But it should be crystal clear that a libertarian movement which imperiously insists upon atheism as a necessary condition for membership is going to needlessly alienate countless numbers of potential supporters. Atheists, to be sure, believe that Christianity, like other theism, is an error; but there are millions of errors in the world, and it passeth understanding why this particular one should bar Christians from the libertarian community. There is certainly no substantial reason why Christians and atheists cannot peacefully coexist within the libertarian movement. It is high time, therefore, for all libertarians, Christian and atheist alike, to blow the whistle on the anti-Christian abuse that has infected the movement for so long a time.

But there is more to the tale than that. For while every rationalist libertarian must hold reason higher than tradition, there is one sense in which the traditionalist conservatives have gotten hold of a very important point, and one that has been unfortunately overlooked by the rationalists. And that is wrapped up in the great truth of the division of labor: the fact that the vast majority of people have neither the ability nor the skill to carve out a rational ethic on their own. Ethics is a science, a discipline like other disciplines; and as in any other branch of knowledge it is vain folly to begin exploration of the science afresh and on one's own while disregarding all the other explorers and thinkers who have gone before, I once knew a Randian who tried to deduce astronomy a priori and out of his own head without bothering to consult any of the other literature in the field. While this was a caricature and a half-jest on his part, it exemplified all too well the rationalist - and particularly the Randian - disposition to attempt to carve out a body of thought without bothering to read one's predecessors. In the field of ethics and philosophy in general, it is simply an empirical fact that the greatest thinkers, for two thousand years, have been Christian; and to ignore these Christian philosophers and to attempt to carve out an ethical system purely on one's own is to court folly and disaster.

Apart from their respective merits, then, it is no accident that, in practical application - from sex to music - Christian ethicists should have a far more rational batting average than the Randian. After all, Randian thought has only been in existence for a decade or two, while Christianity has had two thousand years to develop. We stand on the shoulders of the thinkers of the past, even though of course we must use our reason to correct them.

But there are further, and grimmer, implications here for rationalists. For if few people have the ability or inclination to carve out an ethical system on their own, this means that they must - if their actions are to be guided by any coherent set of values - take them passively, almost on trust. But who then are the masses of men to trust for their system of values? Surely that system with the longest and most successful tradition, with the largest quota of great minds - in short, the Christian ethic, This is a bitter pill for many of us non-Christians to swallow, but I am afraid it is inescapable nevertheless.

This conclusion is reinforced when we look around at what has happened to much of today's libertarian movement. The peculiar aspects of the Randian ethic are as nothing to the bizarreries, to the outright lunacies, into which so many ex-Randians (who constitute the bulk of the libertarian movement) have sunk, in their vain attempts to carve out a system of objective ethics on their own. (The latest craze, so we have heard, is "rational bestiality.") The Christian ethic is, in the words of the old hymn, a Rock of Ages, and it is at least incumbent upon the individual to think long and hard before he abandons that Rock lest he sink into the quagmire of the capricious and the bizarre.