The Misanthropic Generation

There is a passage in Fountainhead that Ms Rand places in the mouth of newspaper oligarch Gail Wynand:

“I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue—and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway—with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway—the kind that can’t cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters—with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope and the white stare of an imbecile—equally. I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company. Is it you who hate mankind, Mrs. Keating?”

It is not an uncommon sentiment, specially among misanthropes. I have come across it twice this week, once in Carl Schmitt and again in Frank Knight.

If it is not a contradiction in thought that one might give the same quality and intensity of affection to all human beings, good, bad, and indifferent, to the most callous criminal or the farthest Eskimo or Patagonian as well as to one’s ” nearest,” and still “love” any of them — if this idea can be formed, it is surely neither attractive nor helpful as a moral ideal. It would seem that a “Christian ” who tried to practice such love would have no friends — being in that respect like the famous economic man. He would not be human (F Knight, “Ethics and Economic Reform” Economica (Nov 1939).

And,

The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapete tous eksdrous humon, and not diligite hastes vestras. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary (C Schmitt, Concept of the Political 1932). 

What strikes me about these sentiments of misanthropy is that they pass for moral and intellectual superiority; hatred and contempt for others as a marker of depth. Knight even credits those who love mankind with the degeneration of civilization because philanthropy promotes mediocrity.

But it is wholly superficial, common, and banal to hate those who hate you or to love only those who love you. Indeed, in the passage of Ms Rand’s cited above, Gail Wynand is portrayed as the ultimate lover of mankind since he always plays to what mankind wants, which is always what is base and common; which is then portrayed as a sign of his misanthropy.

Yet, in one critical respect Ms Rand and Mssrs. Schmitt and Knight differ from Rep. Paul Ryan, open lover of Ms Rand. Where they all were openly hostile to Christianity, he pretends Christian faith. And in this he becomes the object of their jeers. But this poorly conceals their base and common instincts, if that is what we can call them. Saint Paul already made short work of such misplaced elitism in the first two chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians. 

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