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Rush:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Excellence

by Robert Freedmany



August 2014



(preview)

Rush is often referred to as a libertarian rock band, but really, what the band is channeling is an Aristotelian individualism, a philosophy that strongly resonates with today's 40-somethings. This helps explain the band's resurgence in popularity, culminating in its 2013 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 'Rush: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Excellence' brings together the excitement of the band's progressive music, performed by three musicians whose mastery of their instruments has won them the admiration of their peers, and the surprising philosophical sophistication of their music's lyrics. The book is a systematic look at the Aristotelian philosophy embedded in the band's lyrics over its 40-year recording career.



Although the topic of the book is academic, the writing is sharp, down-to-earth, and leavened with a dry wit.



As a cultural phenomenon, Rush is worthy of serious study, and although other books have looked at the philosophical character of the band's music, this is the first time the music over the band's entire 40-year career is demonstrated to fall under a single, unified theory: Aristotelian individualism.



Anyone interested in the band's music, popular culture, and philosophical ideas simply explained will enjoy this entertaining and thought-provoking work. Even readers who have pored over earlier books on Rush will enjoy this unifying theme. While the work ethic and value structure of the middle class is part of the band's philosophy, that is just a subset of the band's Aristotelianism, as shown by Robert Freedman here. The unified Aristotelian philosophy is also different from what's discussed in 'Rush and Philosophy' (edited by Durrell Bowman and Jim Berti) looks at the band's music through multiple philosophical filters and no attempt is made to look at the music through a single, unifying lens. Rather, it approaches the lyrics as literary analysis and provides no overarching theoretical framework.



Algora Publishing (August 11, 2014)

Individualism: Some Geddit, Some Don't



Armed with Sense and Liberty



Individualism: It's Not Just About You, You Know



The Voice of Gawd



The Cask of '43



Foreword

Chapter 2:Chapter 3:Chapter 4:Chapter 5:Chapter 6:AppendicesAppendix II: Meaning of Rush's Clockwork Angels RunesBibliography

Like so many other fans, my obsession with Rush began with this simple, 4-digit number: 2112. One rainy afternoon in the fall of 1982, when I was 12, I discovered a beat-up cassette tape of Rush’s 2112 in a cave behind a waterfall— okay, it was my older brother’s closet, but you get the picture. After several listens on my mono-speaker cassette player I was hooked. What struck me about the music was the power of the lyrics and the emotion in which they were delivered.



The lyrics told a story of discovery, hope, rejection, and despair. These were themes I could relate to, and they were told it in such a way that I felt I was being spoken to, like the song was written for me. In the weeks that followed I devoured Rush’s catalog and would forever be changed by it.



Although I loved the music and recognized the musicianship behind it, the lyrics were what ultimately drove my fascination with the band. The messages of individualism and humanism, often conveyed in stories of science-fiction and fantasy, resonated with me as a teenager. Whenever I was down, I’d listen to Rush as a pick-me-up, or as a form of musical therapy, and whenever I needed strength I would turn to the band for inspiration. There was just so much to think about in what was being said. Whenever a new album came out, I would pore over Neil Peart’s lyrics before listening to a single note, conducting my own philosophical analysis of them.



After speaking to many other fans over the years, from my vantage point as editor and publisher of Rush is a Band, I’ve learned I’m not alone in this practice. Trying to understand what Rush is saying is half the enjoyment of listening to the music. So, it stands to reason that there have been a number of books written over the years just on the band’s lyrics. Robert Freedman’s book, Rush: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Excellence, fits squarely into this genre and is an important addition to it, but it also tries to take lyrical interpretation one step further by bringing together all the different treatments into one grand, unifying theme, Aristotelian individualism, and then showing the historical context into which the band falls.



Whether he’s looking at Aristotle, Ayn Rand, humanism, or critics’ responses to Rush over the years, Freedman brings it all together in a comprehensive history of Rush’s lyrical philosophy and does so in an accessible, down-to-earth manner that I think any Rush fan will enjoy.

Preface

It’s a remarkable turn of events that Rush is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While its brand of hard rock has long had a large and loyal following worldwide, the band has never been “canonical” to many music critics—that is, representative of what’s best about rock and roll. Not only did the band, when it was building its audience in the late 1970s and early 1980s, lack groove, but its spirit of rebellion seemed almost to be going in the wrong direction. While other bands were singing about smiling on your brother and getting together to love one another, it was exhorting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get on with their lives, come what may.



But a lot has changed in the 40 years since the band first came onto the scene from its roots as a Toronto bar band. Today, the forty-somethings that make up its core fan base are moving into positions of power in business, government, academia, entertainment, and the arts and they want their band, the mythmaker of their generation, to be given its due. Maybe that’s why, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 opened its selection process to the public for the first time, Rush was the biggest vote-getter of all the contenders. The people had been given a chance to speak and a band that leaves so many baby boomers mystified is joined with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin in the Pantheon of rock.



Rush really is a mythmaker for a generation. Its tales of the individual against society, cast in the robes of science fiction and fantasy in the band’s early years, formed the perfect backdrop for the first generation growing up on video games and harnessing the Internet. It’s all about the individual empowered: armed with sense and liberty, together each of us helps create a world that’s a perfect sphere, heart and mind united.



There are plenty of books available today on Rush: biographies, lyrical interpretations, and scholarly essays. As I write this, more are on the way. This book is intended to organize the band’s ideas under a single philosophical framework to show how the band is in fact canonical—maybe not in the mainstream-rock sense but in the intellectual sense. Rush’s lyrics over the decades put its point of view firmly in the great Western intellectual tradition of Aristotle, John Locke, and Adam Smith. So when you listen to the band’s 165 original compositions, you’re hearing the same ideas that animated Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson—only a lot louder.



Alex Ross, the fine music critic for The New Yorker, says it’s presumptuous for critics like him to interpret the work of the living. But that doesn’t make the critic’s job any less necessary. The artists themselves are not the best guides to their music, because they can never know with certainty that their audience is hearing the same thing they’re saying. It’s the critics who help them know whether they’re making that connection.



In the case of Rush, it’s pretty clear that what Rush is saying and what their audience is hearing are one and the same thing, and this book is the case I’ve built to show that.

Introduction: Clear Enough

—Robert Freedman, Alexandria, Va.

When Rush started out as a Toronto bar band in the early 1970s, playing clubs like Abbey Road, the Colonial Tavern, and the Piccadilly Tube on the city’s main strip, Yonge Street, the focus was only on the music, not the lyrics.



“Most of the lyrics were just what rhymed, whatever fit in,” says the band’s original drummer, the late John Rutsey. “We never really spent much time at all on the lyrics.”



It shows.



“Hey, now, baby / Well, I like your smile / Won’t you come and talk to me / For a little while?”



That stanza’s from “In the Mood” by Geddy Lee, the band’s vocalist and bass player, who says it was the first song he ever wrote.



Other pieces from their early days are equally nondescript, with lines like “I’m runnin’ here / I’m runnin’ there / I’m lookin’ for a girl,” from “Need Some Love,” and “Ooh, said I, I’m comin’ out to get you / Ooh, sit down, I’m comin’ out to find you,” from “Finding My Way,” both of which appeared on the band’s 1974 debut album, Rush.



Whatever the band is on its first album—“Led Zeppelin junior,” as one critic called them, or “high energy rock,” as another did, —no one would accuse them of striving for lofty lyrical heights. The only exception is “Working Man,” the piece that won them initial attention on the radio. Its aggressive, meaty guitar riff and high-octane vocals caught the attention of Cleveland WMMS program director Donna Halper and impressed their future Mercury label rep Cliff Burnstein. “I get up at seven, yeah / And I go to work at nine / I got no time for livin’ / Yes, I’m workin’ all the time.”



Maybe not much better than “I’m runnin’ here / I’m runnin’ there / I’m lookin’ for a girl,” but it’s about something: the day-to-day grind of bringing home a paycheck and wondering whether this is all there is to life for a young man.



Had Rush carried on in this fashion, it’s a question whether they would have achieved the success they’ve had over their 40-year career or whether, as one early critic put it, they would have simply flamed out. “The only weakness with all of this has to do with the lyrics,” Jim Knippenberg of the Cincinnati Enquirer said after he watched one of the band’s early shows. “They could use some polish. And a little variety. Perhaps some getting away from the ‘love is the thing’ and ‘let’s boogie’ for a time.”



Knippenberg was prescient, because all that changed once Neil Peart, a drummer with an insatiable appetite for thinking about the world, came on board.



Rutsey, a diabetic who was conflicted about whether the rock and roll lifestyle was for him and who wrestled with creative differences with his band mates, left in late 1974, just before they were to start on their first tour, as opening act for Manfred Mann and Uriah Heep in Pittsburgh at the Civic Arena.



His departure forced Lee and Alex Lifeson, the band’s guitarist, to find a replacement without delay, and of course this is where Peart steps in, the tale well-told how he pulled up in an old clunker with his drums stuffed in garbage pails and earned himself the job. “After I heard Neil play, there was no one else who could come after the guy,” Lee says.



At first Peart was impressive simply because of his drumming: powerful and versatile, and for that he’s been duly recognized, called by some fellow drummers nothing less than the world’s greatest living rock drummer. Not all drummers would agree with that, of course, and certainly few critics would, but there’s little doubt of the impact he’s had on his craft.



But Peart also brought his lyric-writing to the mix, and that really changed everything. Once the three of them started writing songs together, while driving from date to date on that first 1974 tour, the breadth and depth of what their songs were about suddenly exploded, and the range and complexity of the music exploded as well. It was as if, musically, Lee and Lifeson wanted to up their game in the same way Peart had helped them up their lyrics, and that was reflected in the band’s second album, Fly by Night, released in 1975.



“A real unity of purpose was beginning to develop,” Peart has written of those first months traveling together. “We were pooling our creative resources, and exploring each other’s aptitudes and personalities.”



The ABCs of the Peart effect



You can really hear the change in the band’s music in two early bootleg recordings that were turned into a commercial CD in 2012, called ABC 1974, with the “ABC” standing for “Agora Ballroom Cleveland.” The CD is divided into two sections, both of which are based on live recordings at the Agora Ballroom, the first from a 1974 show, while the band was touring to promote their debut album, and the second from a 1975 show, while they were promoting Fly by Night.



Peart is behind the drum kit for both shows, so when you listen to the CD you hear his influence throughout. But the lyrical change between the 1974 songs and the 1975 tracks is unmistakable. Suddenly the music has a completely new complexity, the pieces far more composed, the bluesy jamming de-emphasized, and, most importantly, the words coming out of Lee’s mouth are no longer just ad hoc accompaniment to the music; they’re actually words that say something and that you want to hear.



In short, with Peart now picking up the wordsmithing, a job he says he took only because neither Lee nor Lifeson had any interest in it, Rush was transformed from an exciting but conventional hard rock band with a facility for odd time signatures to a newly interesting musical enterprise with a piercing point of view.



This isn’t to say that critics suddenly began to pay the band respect because of Peart. Indeed, as the band’s biographies have made clear, Peart in some ways was as much a liability as an asset, his lyric writing scoffed at, sneered at, and laughed at by not one but two and maybe even three generations of music critics. The now-defunct Blender magazine notoriously voted Peart the second-worst rock lyricist of all time (Sting was voted the first), and critics have tripped over themselves dismissing his lyrics in the most pointed way. Steve Weitzman in Circus magazine called them “caca” and Jon Pareles of the New York Times called them “screeds” in two examples.



Of course, it wasn’t just Peart’s lyrics that inspired critics to compete amongst themselves to dismiss the band; Lee’s vocals were also the target of a spirited competition to find the most memorable put-down. The music critic of the London Globe & Mail uproariously compared Lee’s singing to “the damned howling in Hades,” John Griffin of the Montreal Gazette says he sounds like a “guinea pig with an amphetamine habit,” and Dan Nooger of Circus says of his singing, if it got any higher, it would only be intelligible to “dogs and extraterrestrials.”



So, the band in its early years, although it was building a sizable fan base, remained something outside the mainstream, at least in the eyes of some of the music industry’s most well-known critics, including Rolling Stone’s Robert Christgau and David Wild, neither of whom could ever reconcile themselves to the band’s sound.



Of course, fast forward to today and the story’s quite a bit different, with even mainstream critics having come around. Rolling Stone, long thought of as the band’s nemesis with its sometimes harsh snubs of their music, in early 2012 came out with an admiring feature, and, a few months later, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, founded by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, nominated and then inducted the band into its hallowed halls (or “hollow” halls, as some critics call it).



In truth, Peart is not a natural poet, and his lyrics are far from eloquent. Bob Dylan is a poet. Fellow Canadian Neil Young has been called a poet. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, John Lennon, Pete Townsend—these are rock poets, many critics would agree. Peart, by contrast, although he writes in many poetic verse forms, is really a prose writer, and that might explain why so many critics never took to his style. In the early years, while the band’s fan base was digging his style—these were the days of epic heroic tales like “The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth” and short stories like “Red Barchetta” and “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”—the critics were just seeing cheesy tales of science fiction and fantasy. As Blender put it in its October 2007 smackdown, “richly awful tapestries of fantasy and science.”



If you don’t count Clockwork Angels, the band’s chart-topping concept album that came out in 2012, Peart pretty much packed away his science fiction and fantasy pen years ago, the last piece written in that genre, “Red Barchetta,” about a futuristic car chase, coming out in 1981 on the band’s popular Moving Pictures album.



But Peart never packed away his signature style, which is a kind of prose writing that looks at matters with an air of critical detachment, as if he’s standing apart from the messy world around him and just explaining how things are and how they could be a whole lot better if people would just listen—listen to what he’s saying. “I truly believed that if I could just express things well enough—injustice, narrow-mindedness, destructive and thoughtless behavior—people would recognize their own folly, and change,” he says in his 2007 book Roadshow (ECW Press).



“War Paint” from the band’s 1989 album Presto is a great example of Peart’s hunger to explain. Critics jumped on the album and on songs like “War Paint” as examples of everything the band was doing wrong in the mid-1980s, the band’s middle period, as it’s sometimes called, but the piece showcases the kind of critical writing that Peart does so well. “All puffed up with vanity / We see what we want to see / To the beautiful and the wise / The mirror always lies.”



You can call the lyrics poetry if you want, but it’s not in their meter or symbolism that their strength lies; it’s in the qualities they share with prose writing. They don’t invite you to tease out their meaning, the way a poem does. Their meaning is already pretty clear. They want to inform, educate, explain, analyze, and criticize. That’s why Peart’s lyrics have seemed to some to have a concrete, almost clunky quality to them. These are lyrics of a writer who wants to be understood.



In these lines he’s describing young people’s short-sightedness about what’s important. They spend all their time thinking about how they look, whether they can attract the eyes of the ones they want to hang with, but they’ve completely misplaced their priorities. They should be uncovering who they are—living the examined life—so they can go out and take the world by the horns and thrive. Instead, their horizon doesn’t extend past the next party.



“Second Nature,” on the band’s 1987 Hold Your Fire album, another piece snubbed by critics, is also a good example. Here, Peart is using the motif of an open letter to entreat leaders of industry and government to think of the environment as something more than an afterthought. He’s not saying that going for profit or political gain is a bad thing; he’s just saying that one’s planning horizon should be expansive enough to take in the big picture— and that’s a goal we should all be capable of agreeing on. “A memo to a higher office / Open letter to the powers that be / To a god, a king, a head of state / A captain of industry / To the movers and the shakers / Can’t everybody see? / It ought to be second nature / I mean, the places where we live / Let’s talk about this sensibly / We’re not insensitive / I know progress has no patience / But something’s got to give.”



Once again, we have Peart standing apart from the action in the lyrics and playing the role of commentator: “We all see the problem, don’t we? Now let’s see what we can do to fix it.”



This kind of disinterest, or personal separation, is what defines Peart’s lyric writing through its many stages, and arguably this is what psychology professor Mitch Earleywine is getting at in the 2011 book Rush and Philosophy (Open Court Press) when he says Rush’s music serves as a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy to listeners. Earleywine, professor of clinical psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, says in his essay “Rush’s Revolutionary Psychology” that listening to Rush is a bit like listening to a trusted therapist say to you, “The world is what it is. You need to find what you like to do and get out there and do it.”



“Rush pairs music with words in a way that trains listeners in some of the key ideas in modern psychology,” Earleywine says, “leading us to think clearly, responsibly, and happily.”



Although Earleywine doesn’t make this connection, the reason Rush has this effect on listeners, you can argue, is because of the space Peart leaves in his lyrics for you to insert yourself and apply what’s being said to your own situation. Although Peart makes it clear he’s writing from his own experience, he’s not turning the magnifying glass onto himself while he explores his emotions. Rather, he’s taking himself out of the picture and universalizing his experience into a generalization that listeners can relate to. Instead of, “I need to get out there and be my own person!” he says, “You need to get out there and be your own person!”



“The beauty of all these tunes,” Earleywine says, “comes in the way they are the incarnation of their own recommendations.”



There are exceptions to everything, and there are exceptions to this disinterested approach, too. “Limelight,” the band’s big hit on Moving Pictures, is autobiographical. It looks at the problem people face when they’re in the limelight and fans breach their personal space. As Peart has said in many interviews, the song is about his discomfort when fans act like they know him. And it would have been explicitly autobiographical except that, at Lee’s suggestion, the word “I” was changed to “one,” so it comes across in a more universalized way: “One must put up barriers / To keep oneself intact.”



Many of the pieces on the band’s 2007 Vapor Trails album, released after the band took a five-year hiatus while Peart pulled his life back together after a string of personal losses, are similarly inward-gazing. But even here, the pieces are not the emotional stream of poetic consciousness you might expect from a person trying to come to grips with matters. They remain written in a way that provides plenty of room for you, as listener, to insert yourself and relate what Peart is writing to your own experience.



“Like the rat in a maze who says / ‘Watch me choose my own direction’ / Are you under the illusion / The path is winding your way?”



This stanza is from “The Stars Look Down,” a bleak look at how the heavens can often seem to look on with complete indifference to our personal pain, whether deserved or not. That’s certainly how you would expect to feel if you’re the victim of what appears to be random misfortune, but in the way the feeling is related in the piece, we’re invited to share in Peart’s observations about it without entering his personal space, because the piece, while written from his personal experience, isn’t about him but about the universalizable experience of feeling that way. He brings you into the piece by asking you, “Are you under the illusion / The path is winding your way?”



Jim Berti, co-editor with Durrell Bowman of Rush and Philosophy, says in his essay “Ghost Riding on the Razor’s Edge” that he took a lot of solace in Peart’s lyrics in 2009 when he was dealing with his own issues. At one point, he says, “I was experiencing my own personal Hell, a dark period that [stretched] the line of physical and mental breakdown. As I have done so often during rough patches in life, I turned to Rush to help me through. . . . I’m not saying that my problems were the same as Peart’s, but I shared the same feelings . . . and hearing Peart’s story told through music was the perfect combination of emotional and physical release for me.”



Although Berti doesn’t frame it in these terms, one can certainly make the case that he would not have found the same solace if the lyrics were too me-focused—that is, focused on the writer’s emotional experience without regard to how listeners are supposed to relate to it, which is the way so many musicians approach lyric writing. I don’t intend to be critical of Lifeson, whose focus all along has been on the band’s music and who has never fancied himself a lyricist, but you can see the difference in how Peart approaches writing lyrics compared to how Lifeson approaches it, in the few times he’s contributed the lyrics for Rush and for his own 1996 solo album, Victor.



Here’s a stanza from “Lessons,” one of the pieces on the backside of the band’s breakout 2112 album, released in 1976. Lifeson is given sole credit for the piece. “Sweet memories / I never thought it would be like this / Reminding me / Just how close I came to missing / I know that / This is the way for me to go / You’ll be there / When you know what I know / And I know.”



These are perfectly fine lyrics and you can find lyrics of this style in lots of pop and rock songs. Just consider for a moment “Sam’s Town” by The Killers on their 2006 album of the same name. “Why do you waste my time? / Is the answer to the question on your mind / And I’m so sick of all my judges / So scared of what they’ll find.”



Both of these cases show inward-looking and personal lyrics, with veiled emotional meaning that’s clearly important to the writer but leaves little chance for the listener to find a place for himself in them. We see this in any writing in which the writer is talking about something personal to himself and is exercising the need to express something about himself without regard to whether it makes any sense to the reader or listener.



The lyrics on Lifeson’s solo album, Victor, are very much of this nature. “What if I wasn’t so scared? / Why can’t I be brave? / I’ve forgotten all that we’ve shared / You can’t give me what I crave.”



Again, perfectly fine lyrics and of a type that you see in many pop and rock songs, but this stanza, taken from “Promise,” is almost too personal and self-absorbed to invite a third-party—that is, the listener—into the conversation. It seems like Lifeson is having a personal conversation with his wife or someone else and we’re invited to listen in, but we’re not sure we should intrude.



In truth, in addition to being the band’s “musical scientist,” as his band mates have called him, Lifeson is a genuinely funny writer. Some of his “essays” in the band’s tour books over the years are gems, so he certainly knows how to connect with an audience. Here’s an excerpt from his equipment list in Rush’s 1982 Signals tour book:

I’ve broken down the equipment I’m using into three categories: amplification, guitarification and effectification. It is truly an amazing coincidence how similar all three categories are to each other. For instance, through my keen sense of awareness, I’ve noticed all three have a series of knobs. Also the amps and assorted effects all have glowing lights.



The amps I’m using are four Marshall Combos, which we jokingly refer to as the Marshall Combos.



For effects, I have many: a Westinghouse Blender, two Amana Freezers, a gas pedal, a flower pedal, Maestro Parametric Filter, cigarette filter, six nozzles, three lungs, and an M.X.R. Micro Amp. All of these effects are capable of producing a wide range of sounds. Some are scary while some are awful. I prefer the scary sounds.

In any case, given Peart’s approach to lyric-writing, it doesn’t come as a surprise that he’s found great success with his prose writing, something he took up early in his career with Rush but which, as he describes it in interviews and in his essays, didn’t come to much until he hit on a genre that he felt really suited him, which is a kind of adventure travel memoir. As we know from his own remarks on the matter, he self-published a few short travel memoirs in the 1980s for family and friends while he perfected his literary approach and then went for broke with publication in 1996 of a travel memoir about his bicycle trip through Cameroon with a small tour group, The Masked Rider (Rounder Books).



Following publication of that book, he limited his writing to letters and journaling while he came to grips with the death of his daughter, in 1997, and then his wife, in 1998. But once he returned to the band and started writing again, his literary output was prodigious: Ghost Rider, about motorcycling in the wake of his personal losses, in 2002; Traveling Music, about the development of his musical tastes, in 2004; and Roadshow, about the band’s 30-year anniversary tour, in 2007.



Meanwhile, he published more of this type of travel-memoir writing when he launched his blog, News, Weather & Sports, in 2005, and with the compilation of his monthly blog posts into his book Far and Away in 2010. All of the books were published by ECW Press in Toronto.



These travel memoirs are important to mention because they provide the perfect bookend to the approach Peart has taken over the years in his lyric writing. They’re personal, yes, and they’re based on his experiences, but his point never gets lost in a vague miasma of emotions and unresolved psychological issues. He keeps himself far enough in the distance that we, as readers, can insert ourselves in his place and see things from his point of view. We’re not onlookers as he tries to discover himself; he’s discovered himself already and now he’s inviting us along for the ride while he talks about what he’s found significant and why, and it makes for compelling reading—and, in the case of his lyrics, compelling listening. Peart is an accomplished writer.



What it’s all about: personal stewardship



So, the arrival of Peart helped Lee and Lifeson take their music to a new level. But what does that mean? What was Rush talking about once Peart came on board and they began talking to their listeners in a meaningful way?



Well, the short answer is, they were talking about individualism. You hear a lot in the media about Rush’s libertarianism, but really what Rush has been about from the beginning is individualism. This is simply the idea that each of us is a sovereign and, as such, we have certain inalienable rights— but also certain responsibilities. And almost everything Geddy Lee sings about, when he sings lyrics written by Peart, which is 90 percent of the time, touches in some way on individualism.



The idea of individualism is so basic to our way of life, at least in the West, that it almost seems meaningless, like the idea of air: it’s all around us and life depends on it and we just take it for granted so there’s really not that much to say about it.



While the notion of individualism has been widespread since the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, the idea of each of us possessing personal sovereignty will always have to compete with the needs of society, which in every social group requires some agreed-upon bounds of conduct. Battles continue to rage over what a state can and can’t compel us to do. Do we have an unbreachable right to own a gun? Do we have a right to an abortion? At what point does personal sovereignty end and state sovereignty take over? The issues related to individualism are far from settled.



Peart made these issues that relate to our personal sovereignty a key theme of the band’s music. And that is rather unique in the world of rock music.



To be sure, other bands and musicians have touched on themes of individualism and indeed have been “political” in the sense that they have taken a position on how things should be run. Think of the progressive social consciousness in much of the folk rock in the 1960s, with the likes of Peter Ochs (“I Ain’t Marching Anymore”), Joan Baez (“We shall Overcome”), and Judy Collins (“Turn! Turn! Turn!”) channeling the old heroes like Woody Guthrie (“Vigilante Man”) and Pete Seeger (“If I had a Hammer”). It’s not just the folk rockers who do this, of course. Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, U2, REM—any number of pop and rock acts have built social consciousness into their music in a big way.



On the other side of the political spectrum we have acts like The Bobby Fuller Four singing “I fought the Law,” Sammy Hagar singing “I Can’t Drive 55,” and The Kinks singing “20th Century Man” to remind us that the meeting place between our rights as an individual and the rights of the society in which we live is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes the line moves to the left a bit, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, in the United States, Canada, and the U.K., and sometimes it moves to the right a bit, as it did beginning in the 1980s, again, whether in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.



But Peart’s take on individualism isn’t a political one. Of course, there’s often a political element to it, because ultimately our individual rights are part of a larger political conversation. That’s why when Peart writes in “Second Nature,” the Rush piece in the form of an open letter, there’s a political element to it. He’s writing to private and public leaders and asking them to find the middle ground that will enable the private sector to continue doing its thing while keeping in mind the public-interest aspect of our environment. He knows “perfect’s not for real,” he says, but can’t we still “make a deal”?



But mostly Peart’s take on individualism, particularly in the early years, is a moral one. It’s about the battle each of us faces as we wrestle with how to strike a balance in our own lives, whether to seize our sovereignty and be a leader or to let it wither on the vine while we allow ourselves to be led. We all think of ourselves as leaders of our own lives, but really in many small ways we prefer to abdicate responsibility for ourselves to others. On the surface this seems political: I can’t find a job, therefore the government should try to help me get a job or at least pay me unemployment while I look. I’m sick and my illness can easily wipe me out financially, therefore the government at a minimum should step in so I don’t lose my ability to support myself. I want to smoke pot and I don’t feel I should be at risk of getting arrested for it since I’m not hurting anyone else, so the government should legalize pot.



Peart’s approach to these issues asks not so much whether government intervention is right or wrong than, what kind of person am I? At the end of the day, do I have the strength of character to steer my ship through the shoals of life and take responsibility for myself, regardless of the outcome and regardless of how interventionist or non-interventionist my government is? In other words, this isn’t about me versus the government; it’s about me versus me. Do I have what Aristotle called virtue?



This is the mistake that is made so often in the media when music critics and reporters throw out shorthand references to Rush as a libertarian band. They see far-right politicians and commentators like Rand Paul and Rush Limbaugh quoting from or using Rush music for their own didactic purposes and they give a knowing wink and nod and say, “Rush, the libertarian rock band.”



But as Steven Horwitz makes clear in his essay in Rush and Philosophy, “Rush’s Libertarianism Never Fit the Plan,” although Peart incorporated libertarian references in some of his earliest work with Lee and Lifeson, the band is really not an avatar of libertarian values. What it really is, Horwitz says, is an avatar of individualist values, which is not reducible to libertarianism.



“Even where Peart seems to reject elements of libertarianism . . . he still holds on to a very clear commitment to the dignity and centrality of the individual and the individual’s ability to achieve greatness and overcome tragedy,” Horwitz says. “What we might call Rush’s ‘individualism’ (and I do think this is a description that applies to all three band members) provides the overarching philosophical theme of their career, from their own choices as a band to the lyrical content.” [Emphasis supplied.] Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.



Indeed, as another Rush and Philosophy contributor shows, Rush is a carrier of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Neil Florek, a philosophy professor at Purdue University, in his essay “Free Wills and Sweet Miracles,” shows how much of what Rush sings about is virtuous living under an Aristotelian framework. He identifies a number of the Aristotelian virtues, like courage, justice, moderation in Rush’s music, and adds a couple more that can be found in it that are uniquely Rushian: persistence and what he calls “prudent nonconformity.”



As he puts it, “Like the most important, influential philosophers of the Western world, Rush’s music expresses a conception of how best to live to become excellent, happy persons,” says Florek.



Thus, what you have in Rush’s lyrics is Peart’s brand of disinterested commentary about right living from an Aristotelian virtue perspective, and, whether it’s early Rush or late Rush, it’s there like bedrock: everything Rush sings about, whether it concerns relationships, environmentalism, the social order, or religion, among the big variety of topics the band hits, it’s all laid on top of this bedrock of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which in turn is the bedrock for individualism.



As we’ll see, this is where the band’s connection to Ayn Rand comes in. Just as it has been linked to libertarianism, the band has been called Randian for its adherence, in its earliest years, to the ideas of the 1950s-era Objectivist philosopher who made her name with her big, thick novels about self-reliant movers and shakers who don’t need namby-pamby government stepping in to make the world a kinder, gentler place for everyone.



But although early on Peart did make explicit references to her work, not only is he not her “disciple,” as he has put it, but the philosophy in Rush’s music has little in common with what Rand’s Objectivist vision is all about. Rather, both Rand’s Objectivism and Rush’s individualism are grounded in Aristotelianism, so commentators routinely conflate the two and say they are talking about the same thing. But they merely share this common ancestor. Their viewpoints are actually quite a bit different.



As Deena and Michael Weinstein put it in “Neil Peart versus Ayn Rand” in Rush and Philosophy, the two Rush songs most closely associated with Rand, the band’s 1975 “Anthem” on Fly by Night and the 1976 breakout “2112,” ultimately go in directions that is diametrically opposed to Rand. “[W]hatever [Peart’s] intentions happened to be when he wrote the lyrics . . . the protagonist of “2112” would be anathema to Rand,” the Weinsteins say. Deena is professor of sociology at DePaul University and Michael is professor of political science at Purdue University.



Politically, rather than channeling Rand’s brand of libertarianism (a term Rand wouldn’t use), in which the smallest government is the best government, otherwise the state will impede the sovereignty of the individual, Rush is channeling the classical liberalism of our Western heroes like John Locke and Adam Smith.



Classical liberalism is a term that applies to the Enlightenment principles that form the framework of the Constitution in the United States and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in France. In fact, you can say that classical liberalism is really the governing philosophy of every Western democracy today.



It’s simply the view that we as individuals consent to give up some of our natural rights to take advantages of the benefits that come from organizing ourselves into a governed society. “Every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it,” Locke says in the second treatise of his 1689 classic, Two Treatises of Government.



It’s very much an individualistic governing model, because the sovereignty of the individual remains sacrosanct. And yet classical liberalism isn’t as extreme as libertarianism, because, under it, the amount of rights we’re willing to give up isn’t based on some set amount—government can do these things and no more—but rather is a fluid, constantly adjusting amount based on what we (democratically) agree we want our government to do for us. As Locke puts it, we “give up all the power necessary to the ends for which [we] unite into society.”



In Locke’s classical liberal view, even though there’s no formula for how much in rights individuals are willing to give up for the benefits of society, there are certain inviolable limits that no society can breach, at least systematically, and these are our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (“happiness” in the U.S. Constitution). To the extent a society tries to breach these rights, which are inalienable, individuals have the right— even the duty—to overthrow the government. Locke puts it this way:

[I]f a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.

Finding the point of trade-off between our rights and those of the society is really the political program of Rush, not Randian extremism. That’s why you can go back to songs like “Second Nature” and see Peart searching for where to plant the line between our individual sovereignty and government sovereignty. Where that line should be is no simple question, and it can’t be glibly answered. Ideally, it’s where the parties agree to draw it and with the understanding that our inalienable rights will be left standing.



Thus, with Rush, Aristotelian virtue ethics serve as the foundation for individualism, which serves as the foundation for classical liberalism. This takes us to one more spot on Peart’s philosophical road map: humanism.



Much has been made of Peart’s humanism in recent years, principally because it plays such a major theme in the band’s 2007 Snakes & Arrows album (and, as we’ll see, Clockwork Angels) and he’s long dabbled in the topic in his prose writing. There are many types of humanism, including some that don’t rule out the notion of God, but in general humanism is simply the view that the world is what we see before us and our sense of morality flows from that and not from some type of intervention from a deity that we can’t account for in the natural world. What’s important for our purposes is that right and wrong under humanism is grounded in the idea of human flourishing, meaning that humanism shares the same individualist bedrock of Aristotelian virtue ethics. That’s why it seems to flow so naturally out of what Rush has been singing about all along. Chris McDonald, an ethnomusicology instructor at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, talks about Rush’s humanism in “Enlightened Thoughts, Mystic Words” in Rush and Philosophy.



And so we come to the point of this book. In the pages ahead, we’ll be looking into the philosophies that build the foundation of Rush’s Aristotelian point of view, as expressed over the band’s recording history. These include individualism (each of us is our own sovereign), classical liberalism (we voluntarily give up some of our sovereignty to live together in society), and humanism (the world is running according to its natural laws so all this business about God intervening in the world is beside the point).



Along the way we’ll even look a little at the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, what we might call a very overcooked version of Aristotelianism.



What’s most interesting is how the philosophies line up so nicely in the words and music of Rush—a testament to an admirable consistency on the part of Peart’s thinking over the years even as his (and the band’s) ideas continue to evolve in interesting ways. But what never changes lyrically in Rush’s music is the individualism of Aristotle. For planting your own philosophical flag and standing your moral ground, you would be hard pressed to find a better starting point than that.

Chapter 1. And the World Is Set in Motion





Hold Your Fire from 1987 is rarely mentioned among Rush’s more memorable albums. The trio from Canada that helped create progressive metal in the late 1970s with their breakout “2112” concept piece and gave us radio hits like “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight” were trying to find their legs at a time when synthetic pop acts like George Michael and Kenny G. were topping the charts. The one piece from their 1987 album to get radio play, “Time Stand Still,” shows, in its pop-sounding melody and use of backing vocals by Aimee Mann of ’Til Tuesday, a willingness to abandon metal completely and stretch their idea of progressivism.



Only the album’s opening piece, “Force 10,” a last-minute addition to force a tenth title onto the tracklist (when people were still listening to music on cassette tapes), has the kind of hard-rock edge that the band’s fan base tended to like.



Lyrically, drummer and main wordsmith Neil Peart was at his most earnest, and not necessarily in a good way. In “Tai’ Shan,” a piece that includes a sampled Japanese shakuhachi flute to evoke a sense of otherness, Peart recounts a climb he took two years earlier to a sacred Chinese site, Mount Tai, where visitors are said to have mystical experiences upon reaching the top. “High on the sacred mountain / Up the seven thousand stairs / In the golden light of autumn / There was magic in the air.”



A little sophomoric, you might say of the lyrics. Rather pedestrian.



“You’re supposed to be crappy when you make your first three or four records,” Geddy Lee, the band’s vocalist and bass player, says in a March 2009 Blender magazine interview. “When I listen to [‘Tai’ Shan’] it’s like, ‘Bzzt. Error.’ We should have known better.”



But the album includes a very interesting piece. “Prime Mover” touches on a subject that you won’t find many rock bands taking a stab at: teleology. Teleology is the old Greek discipline of trying to articulate the design and purpose of the universe. In the most famous teleological argument of all time, depicted by Raphael on the ceiling of the Pope’s private library in the Vatican, you have Plato, pointing upward, positing the existence of a demiurge, and Aristotle, gesturing toward the ground, positing the existence of a prime mover.



Plato says this demiurge (or demiourge, “worker of the people”), which you can picture as an old bearded watchmaker, sets the gears and wheels of the world in motion. He’s like a god, only with limited powers: a craftsman who sits between eternity, the world of Plato’s timeless and ideal Forms, and the heavens, a replica of that ideal world here in our material world. Once he sets the gears and wheels of the world in motion, that’s it. He can no more alter the trajectory of events than you or I can. If it helps, you can think of Plato’s idea of the demiurge as the source of deism, the idea that God created the world but doesn’t intervene in its affairs now that it’s up and running.



Aristotle’s prime mover is quite a bit different. Instead of pushing the world into existence by setting substance into motion, he pulls the world into existence by motivating, or inspiring, change, in the same way a saucer of milk motivates a cat to get up from her nap to slake her thirst. As Aristotle puts it in his Metaphysics, “[T]he object of desire and the object of thought move in this way; they move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are one and the same. . . . [T]he thinking is the starting-point.”



Aristotle’s view is in many respects more intellectually satisfying than Plato’s, because substance in the world is striving toward something, rather than just being a passive recipient of something. (For a really interesting contemporary take on this idea, read What Technology Wants (Viking Adult: 2010), by Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly.) What’s more, Aristotle makes room for the idea of chance, so the world isn’t completely determined. As he puts it in his Metaphysics, “It is obvious that there are principles and causes, which are generable and destructible apart from the actual processes of generation and destruction, for if this is not true, everything will be of necessity.”



No excuse to get wild



What makes Rush’s song “Prime Mover” interesting is that it tries to encapsulate the different perspectives of this teleological debate into five and a half minutes of rock, and it’s pretty good rock at that. Rush is saying the world spins like a Platonic top that’s been set in motion by its craftsman and is now just whirling randomly, with no purpose or aim. As Lee sings, “From the point of ignition / To the final drive / The point of the journey is not to arrive.”



Two other verses make the same point about the lack of destination. “From a point on the compass / To magnetic north / The point of the needle moving back and forth” and “From the point of entry / Until the candle is burned / The point of departure is not to return.”



These lines are all about randomness and existential absurdity, a theme Rush picks up again quite a number of times in later years, including in the title piece to its 1991 album Roll the Bones, when it asks, “Why are we here? / Because we’re here / Roll the bones / Why does it happen? / Because it happens / Roll the bones.”



In “Prime Mover,” we’re given a clear picture of the existential absurdity of our world, and then, at the bridge, or middle eight portion of the song, the point of view shifts from a neutral, omniscient narrator to the Platonic watchmaker who crafts everything. “I set the wheels in motion / Turn up all the machines / Activate the programs / And run behind the scene / I set the clouds in motion / Turn up light and sound / Activate the window / And watch the world go ’round.”



Setting the wheels in motion, setting the clouds in motion, turning up light and sound . . . it all sounds a little like a creationist narrative, although of a very different kind than Genesis. It’s the demiurge, who has one foot in eternity and the other in the material world, who creates the material world, but all he’s doing is interpreting eternity as best he can using the gears and wheels of materiality to replicate the world of the gods in a very mechanical way. As Plato says of the demiurge in his Timaeus, he “resolves to have a moving image of eternity.”



So far, “Prime Mover” sounds like it has a lot to do with Plato’s teleological theory and little to do with Aristotle. But Aristotle comes in when the piece talks about how we’re supposed to act in this randomly spinning world.



On the one hand, we’re spinning randomly to nowhere and it’s all outside of our control. On the other hand, this existential reality doesn’t mean we can just do what we want. It’s true no one’s minding the store, but if we run around willy-nilly, with no moral compass to guide us, our lives will be miserable and we’ll make the lives of everyone around us miserable as well. Quality of life matters. It’s not enough to hang on for the ride. If we want to achieve happiness and avoid existential despair, we have to temper our fun with a rational governor. That means editing our actions: putting up a “rational resistance to an unwise urge,” as we hear in the song, or exercising “rational responses” to “force a change of plans.”



Aristotle encapsulates this rational governor, or moral editing process, in which we use our reason to override our impulses, in two key words in his ethical philosophy: akrasia and eudaimonia.



Akrasia is about our desire to pursue immediate pleasure (literally, “lack of mastery” over oneself), and eudaimonia is about our reaching true happiness, or excellence, an end-point requiring us to hold our pleasure-seeking in check.



With eudaimonia, it’s not that we want to live our life as an old scold. Rather, we want to pursue life in a way that enables us to realize our true nature, our final cause, which is the source of true happiness and the antidote to existential despair. And we can’t do that if we allow our lives to be completely subject to akrasia. So we seek balance, which Aristotle defines as the “mean” between deficiency and excess, as determined by our use of reason in pursuit of our true nature.



Purdue University Philosophy Professor Neil Florek does a good job describing eudaimonia in his essay “Free Wills and Sweet Miracles” in Rush and Philosophy. First, he says, it’s up to each of us, using our reason, to determine how we ought to live, what we’re aiming for, and what our ultimate goal is. Although he doesn’t use these terms, this is very much like us acting as our own prime mover in that it’s up to us to seek out our highest end. In that way our thoughts are volitional, like the prime mover’s, because it’s the thoughts that compel us or motivate us to achieve our highest end.



Once we identify what our end is, we seek to achieve it by developing our critical character traits, or virtues—prudence, justice, courage, moderation, and pride, among them—to their “peak form,” as Florek puts it.



In other words, first we will the end, and then we will the means to the end.



Of course, at the same time, we can’t just elbow others out of our way as we pursue our ends. Those around us must be able to pursue their ends equally without hindrance from us or anyone else, because it’s only when we’re all treating one another with respect that our polis, or community, can thrive. To Aristotle, a thriving polis is what our individual freedom is all about. Polis is “prior” to family and to individual. “[T]he state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part” is how Aristotle puts it in his Politics.



Plato’s moral view is quite a bit different. Although the polis is prior to the individual in his view as well, the way you achieve a strong polis is entirely different, and it’s in this difference that we see so much of the power of Rush’s lyrics.



As Plato sees it, in contrast to Aristotle, the rational governor we use to edit our actions shouldn’t be used to help us achieve our own chosen ends. That would just produce chaos, because everyone will be acting in their own selfish interests. Rather, our rational governor should be used to conform our lives to our society’s chosen ends, as determined by our leader, what Plato calls the philosopher-king.



The philosopher-king is the wisest man in the society and he dedicates his life to making the social order run as much like clockwork as possible. He is thus empowered to make the rules—not just for his own benefit, but for the benefit of everybody—and it’s your responsibility as a member of the polis to do what he says and ask no questions, because you can’t be expected to have the same insight he has. As Rush says in “Brought Up to Believe,” one of the pieces from its 2012 album Clockwork Angels, the way of the world is “not ours to understand.”



Thus, if you’re deemed a worker by the philosopher-king, that’s what you are, and your happiness comes from being the best worker you can be. If you’re deemed a warrior (also called an auxiliary), your happiness is based on your fulfilling that role as best you can. And if you’re deemed a leader, or guardian, you devote your life to making yourself knowledgeable so you can act with appropriate wisdom. With everyone in society performing their roles as best they can, everyone is happy and the society is in balance, or “just,” as Plato puts it. “When the trader, the auxiliary, and the guardian each do their own business, that is justice, and will make the city [society] just,” Plato says in his Republic.



Well, there’s no doubt on which side Rush falls on these two different moral views: Aristotle’s. We’re all our own prime mover, and even if the world turns out to be existentially absurd, each of us has the freedom to discover and pursue our ultimate goal, and in so doing, we help strengthen the world around us.



Making sense of existential absurdity



“Prime Mover” is certainly one of the more thoughtful songs of a band that’s known for having a rather philosophical take on things, and by some measure you can say it encapsulates the whole of Rush’s view of the world. To take some liberties, if you could set down in one short paragraph the band’s philosophy, as expressed over its 40-year career recording music, it might look something like this:

We’re in this world by chance. No one’s in control. So, by all means let’s have fun. But to really enjoy ourselves, we have to act responsibly. Otherwise, we’ll be in the gutter by the time we’re 25 and in the process we’ll have dragged down those we love and respect, and, more broadly, made the world a worse place for everyone. For that reason, we have to think about our goals and act accordingly. If we approach life in this way, even if the world is existentially absurd, we at least have our own purpose. That purpose is to become the best person we can be. If each person pursues the goal of becoming the best person he or she can be, each of us will be capable of conferring on and receiving from others love and respect, and the world, as the ultimate beneficiary, will be the best it can be.

On this view, when Peart says in “Freewill,” Rush’s big radio hit from 1980, that he will “choose free will,” he’s saying he will determine what to strive for and how he will get there, even if the world itself is existentially absurd (an “aimless dance,” as he calls the world in the song). He will not pursue a Platonic end in which he does what he’s told to do by the powers that be, who claim to know the purpose of the world. Rather, he will be his own prime mover and seek out his own end. As Florek says of this exercise of individualism, “What we’re really choosing when we ‘choose free will’ are autonomy and responsibility. . . . We must develop our capacity for rational self-direction (autonomy) and take responsibility for our own faults, strengths, failures, and successes.”



Peart revisited this idea in much more depth 25 years later, in Rush’s Clockwork Angels album, which the band released in mid-2012 to much fanfare. (And much success, as it is. It debuted at No. 1 in Canada, the band’s home country, No. 2 in the U.S. on the Billboard Top 200 chart, No. 1 on Amazon’s best seller list for music, and No. 3 on iTunes.)



Over the course of the album’s 12 tracks, the world is presented as a randomly spinning top to nowhere, set in motion by something very much like Plato’s demiurge and ruled by something very much like one of his philosopher-kings, in the character of an old bearded watchmaker. The world is not under the watchmaker’s control, but he would very much have his subjects believe that it is. With this as the context, we meet our hero, Owen Hardy, whose passion, or akrasia, drives him to adventure but whose sense of reason, or rationality, enables him to reach a state of eudaimonia. In the end, he achieves true happiness and lives out his life in peace and harmony in a simple garden, basking in the love and respect of others.



Thus, in a world that’s both completely determined and existentially absurd, our hero, acting as his own prime mover and taking advantage of the windows of opportunity provided by chance, exercises free will in pursuit of his goals. Put another way, we have an Aristotelian self-mover who breaks free of the duties imposed on him by the Platonic society into which he was born and achieves true happiness.



Against this framework, the album-length tale, which Peart says he based loosely on Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide, also serves as a scalding humanistic critique of religion in general and what might be called Leibnizian Christianity in particular. Leibnizian Christianity is the idea, formulated by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 book Theodicy, that ours is the best of all possible worlds because it was created by God, whose omnipresence and omnipotence make it impossible for Him to create anything but the most perfect world.



(The full title of Leibniz’s book is Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. He also talks about this being the best of all possible worlds in his most famous work, Monodology, which lays out his metaphysical theory that the universe is comprised of unchangeable building blocks, called monads, that act in harmony with one another.)



With Candide, Voltaire mercilessly smashes the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds, and with Clockwork Angels, Peart does the same thing, although he has the advantage of doing it in collaboration with his two band mates, Lee and Lifeson, because he gets to do it to some really epic music.



From Aristotle to Locke to Rand to Rush



The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are huge mountain ranges, and in talking about aspects of their moral viewpoints it’s hard to do more than just scratch the surface. But the broad outlines of the differences in the two approaches to ethics are clear: Plato is very much the philosopher of collectivism and Aristotle the philosopher of individualism.



With Plato, it’s all about the society: you adapt yourself to society with the aim of furthering its goals as defined by the leader, the philosopher-king. It’s about fitting in, doing your part, and in return receiving the benefits of the society whose bounty you help create. If you are in the leadership, your role is to lead; if you are in the auxiliary, your role is to protect; and if you are in the working class, your role is to produce. The world is the way it is and we can only passively play the role we are destined to play, and it’s simply not our place to ask any questions about it.



That’s not to say there isn’t social mobility. But it’s the role of the leadership to determine who exercises mobility and to what station in life they move. The leaders are the ones who are wise and whose temperament, intellect, training, and moral compass make them uniquely qualified to make decisions solely for the benefit of society.



If this sounds a lot like a totalitarian society, that’s because it is. Plato is one of our greatest thinkers ever, but you can’t sugarcoat this: he was no democrat. His republic is really a classic dictatorship. Probably no one has expressed this better than Karl Popper, the eminent twentieth-century British philosopher, who says in his 1962 book The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato (Princeton University Press), that Plato mistrusted individual freedom. “Excellent as Plato’s sociological diagnosis was, his own development proves that the therapy he recommended [i.e., his Republic] is worse than the evil he tried to combat. . . . It seems to me to be a consistent and hardly refutable interpretation of the material to present Plato as a totalitarian party-politician, unsuccessful in his immediate and practical undertakings, but in the long run only too successful in his propaganda.” Indeed, “Far from being morally superior to totalitarianism, Plato’s political programme is fundamentally identical with it.”



Eduard Zeller, whose 1881 work The Philosophy of Greeks in Their Historical Development (Longmans, Green, and Co.) remains one of the standards of its genre, makes the exact same point:

Plato had demanded the abolition of all private possession and the suppression of all individual interests, because it is only in the Idea or Universal that he acknowledges any title to true reality. . . . [And he] demands that the whole should realize its ends without regard to the interests of individuals.

But Plato’s totalitarianism isn’t like any we’re familiar with, because in his world his dictatorship is truly benevolent. As he sees it, leaders really are concerned for the welfare of the society. The people who make up the leadership genuinely are the right people for the job based on their temperament, intellect, training, and moral vision. The person who sits on top of this society genuinely is a philosopher-king, whose life is dedicated to using his knowledge and wisdom for the betterment of society as a whole. He’s not out to live richly on the backs of the peasants, with a wink and a nod to social values; he’s out to create a truly harmonious society. As Plato puts it in his Republic, no one who is a ruler would ever “consider and enjoin his own advantage but that of the one whom he rules and for whom he exercises his craft, and he keeps his eyes fixed on that and on what is advantageous and suitable to that in all that he says and does.”



Pardon my reaction



It’s hard to look at Plato’s Republic and not, for lack of a more eloquent way of putting it, snort through your nose, as George Orwell was surely doing when he wrote his 1945 classic Animal Farm. The idea that the leaders of a socialist society will actually govern in the interests of the society seems naïve, to say the least. Creating a society in which leaders set aside their own ambitions to use their intellect and training for the benefit of society and not themselves is hardly plausible, and certainly not something we’ve seen in the real world, not in our lifetime and not historically.



What’s more, even if such a society were to be successfully organized, is it plausible to think of the people as happy or fulfilled under such an arrangement? What about ambition? What about striving to make your mark? Can we really check our egos at the door and happily toil on behalf of the whole rather than for ourselves? In contrast to Plato, Aristotle clearly saw that burying our ambitions in this way simply isn’t in our nature, because for all of us, no matter what our station in life, “living well and doing well” is the universal goal, the object to which we’re constantly being pulled by our nature. Whereas for Plato, the happiness level of any individual, regardless of his station in life, is simply not important, because it’s only the overall smooth workings of the society that matter. “Our aim in founding the state [is] not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole.”



That’s harsh—if you have the misfortune of being born a worker.



Even if the society’s leaders are true philosopher-kings and the people are genuinely happy toiling for the good of the whole, the economic success or failure of the society to provide for its people depends entirely on the wisdom of the leaders. And it was the key insight of Austrian School economists like Ludwig von Mises and his 1974 Nobel Prize-winning student Friedrich Hayek that—regardless of what you think of the modern libertarianism that grew out of their work—even the wisest and most benevolent leaders simply can never know enough to manage a complex economy for optimal growth. It’s simply not humanly possible. Because of the way information and knowledge is dispersed throughout an economy, only a market mechanism can lead to the efficient allocation of resources and the accurate setting of prices.



“It is through the mutually adjusted efforts of many people that more knowledge is utilized than any one individual possesses or than it is possible to synthesize intellectually,” Hayek says in his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press), “and it is through such utilization of dispersed knowledge that achievements are made possible, greater than any single mind can foresee.”



Compared to Plato, the view of Aristotle, whom we can say without equivocation was an early free-marketer, is much more realistic and fulfilling. In his view, we’re all running around trying to find ourselves, discover what’s important to us and what we’re best at. We’re working for ourselves, and by doing so, it’s the society as a whole that benefits, à la Adam Smith and his invisible hand of the market.



Again, it’s Eduard Zeller who captures this idea in The Philosophy of Greeks in Their Historical Development:

To [Aristotle] the Individual is the primary reality, and has the first claim to recognition . . . . [I]n his moral philosophy he transfers the ultimate end of human action and social institutions from the state to the individual, and looks for its attainment in his free self-development. The highest aim of the state consists in the happiness of its citizens. The good of the whole rests upon the good of the citizens who compose it. In like manner must the action by which it is to be attained proceed from the individual of his own free will. It is only from within through culture and education, and not by compulsory institutions, that the unity of the state can be secured.

Anyone familiar with Rush’s music over its 40-year career will recognize the Aristotelian roots of the lyrics. In song after song, whether it’s to be your own change-maker in “Something for Nothing,” on the band’s 2112 album, or to let yourself think big in “Caravan,” in Clockwork Angels, the message that we get is pure Aristotle: identify your goals, make your mark, live for yourself, go out and achieve, and everyone else will benefit by your doing so.



This is what Aristotle’s virtuousness is all about. It’s all about the kind of person you develop into over the course of your life as you first seek your own ends, rather than passively accept your role in life, and then summon, or will, the power to achieve them.



This Aristotelian attitude is arguably one of the characteristics of Rush that has made the band so intuitively attractive, even to listeners who’ve never had the vocabulary to articulate what they hear in the music. Who doesn’t want to have the freedom to find his or her aims in life and then will the power to achieve them? That’s certainly been Rush’s message throughout its career. And that’s what we’ll be looking at next.

[End Chapter 1]