Being a Wilde Olive

I finally found the Oscar Wilde poem that mentions Atys, the one Chesterton quotes in one of his books; it's The Sphinx. Along the way I also read part of Ballad of Reading Gaol, and I realized something. An Objectivist is forbidden—morally forbidden—from enjoying Wilde, and not just because Rand was a foam-flecked rabid psychotic in her hatred of homosexuality (Wilde wasn't gay, sorry identity politics, but homosexuality was one of the things he experimented with).

No, Rand and Wilde are at odds far more in that he was capable of repentance, and was a Christian—even when he wasn't a very good one; Christianity is not a Law, it is a Creed. And he knew, as she didn't—because she had narcissistic personality disorder, the Wikipedia article might as well have her photo on it—that self-indulgence is the opposite of happiness. Anyone who can actually read knows Christians also believe altruism, in the secular sense, is sinful (Aquinas said all sins are either excess or defect, a concept he, but curiously not Rand, gets from Aristotle). Selfishness, however, is the vice a post-Reformation Westerner is more prone to; and either is, again, disproportionate. It is useless to argue—by definition, any ethical system that incorporates "ethical egoism", however high-minded, is fundamentally flawed, since the self is not the arbiter of good, and saying it is has the effect, as the immediate nemesis of the fallacy, of making the self and its desires (however ranked) the ultimate good.

Wilde, though, was too smart to fall for that; sixteen centuries of Christian civilization had taught him to know an idol when he saw one. Thus, the ending of the poem, which might've been written specifically as a response to Rand and her 'droids:

False Sphinx! False Sphinx! By reedy Styx
old Charon, leaning on his oar,
Waits for my coin. Go thou before, and leave
me to my crucifix,

Whose pallid burden, sick with pain, watches
the world with wearied eyes,
And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps
for every soul in vain.

It's funny to me that Rand thinks her critique of the Cross—"sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal" as she put it, with imprecise Christology—is new, or impressive, in any way. Sweetheart, we call that "the Scandal of the Cross", and we glory in it. Her failure reminds me of the line from "The Ball and the Cross"—that particular symbol cannot be defeated, because it is defeat.

P.S., it occurs to me, similarly, that all Libertarians are—and I know this is a paradox—statists. How? Easy. Remember when Letterman made that joke about Sarah Palin's daughter, or when Don Imus called those basketball players "nappy headed hos"? Well a bunch of right-wingers—maybe not all Libertarians, but every man Jack making a libertarian argument—said they shouldn't get in any trouble with their employers, because of the First Amendment. That is, the private employers should be constrained in what they do with their private money, because of a document that only applies to the government. I'm sorry, but if private relations are to be governed by the same principles as the state, then the state is the arbiter of all things. Libertarians may be surprised to learn this, but I believe we have just demonstrated that they, as much as Mussolini, Mao, or Marx, worship the state.

Forgive me, but my religion began as a sect of Judaism. And our tradition rightly boasts that its members do not believe the works of their hands to be god. Do you?