National Review Online has published a short work by Peter Wehner about Ayn Rand that is worth reading, although it is several paragraphs too short. One hopes NRO reproduces and publishes other sober comments about Ayn Rand on their site, including republishing Mr. Chamber’s 1957 Review of Atlas Shrugged. Hopefully, readers of NRO (and this blog) will read Rand’s works and draw innumerable lessons from them, including the one important lesson, that Ayn Rand’s underlying philosophy is unsalvageable and monstrous.
While Ms. Rand’s novels are often a fun read (Anthem is a well written and fairly short work), and should spark some serious reflection and thought on the part of her readers, the ideology of Ms. Rand was ugly, ruthless, cruel and it was an ideology she felt should be the rule book of society as well as Wall Street (her idol). She was deeply wrong.
“We shall execute the whole litany” said regicide Vladimir L*nin as he plunged Russia and other nations into a decades long bloodbath — a nightmare that lasted for decades after he was himself laid out as a mummy on display. Rand was just as sanguinary, just as dedicated a revolutionary and she too is wrongly venerated by the misguided.
Ms. Rand’s philosophy is one of personal satiation — gluttony in all its manifestations and taken to extremes. It is no less hateful of dissenters, no less deadly to those who can not or will not partake of the bitter droughts of carnality and cruelty for the sake of the individual’s revels as ends in themselves. She tolerated deviation from her beliefs no more than the firing parties of the Reds or their close cousins the fascists. Ms. Rand was no advocate of individual rights, no humanist, but an hysterical, sadistic, craven hissing harpy demanding cruelty towards the weak.
Just as the godless Bolshevik allowed of no higher authority than the State which was in reality far removed from the worker, so Rand did too advocate a godless society in which the strong triumphed and those who could not were at best contemned but utilized. Rand brooked no discussion of accountability to a source of authority, morality or ethic higher than herself — the author of her own canon of scripture and sutras.
Yes, I am well aware of the justifiable fears of a theocracy doing horrible harm to us all. Yes, I too am aware of what happens when religion and politics mix and no one is more willing than I to point out the corruption and hypocrisy of even my own denomination — one all too willing to play the role of humble civil servant to the detriment of Christianity and Government. The point is that Marxism, Fascism and Objectivism all see man as the measure of all things, and the sole purpose of all that exists. To these ideologies the universe exists to be made subject to the mightiest of humans. Whomever or whatever doesn’t comply or can’t serve satisfactorily is subject to annihilation, for Rand’s man, and the Soviet and Nationalist States are accountable to no one. Right and wrong in Rand’s system are not based upon any criteria of appropriateness such as Chuang Tzu or any other philosopher would think valid, no concept of universal love as espoused by the much too neglected Mo Tzu, but subject strictly to the base desires of man the hungry tyrant.
Ms. Rand was a seductive writer. She strikes a chord even today with Western men and women who rightly equate their economic prosperity with individual rights and a generally capitalist and market based system. She almost makes sense to advocates of limited government who can point to Washington’s red tape and profligate spending as real enough problems. Ms. Rand almost sounds not-shrill, not wrong, not evil (yes, I use this word in a sense that conveys a sense of sin, mortal sin, damnation, hell, perdition, eternal suffering, the devil. I use it without any concern for the delicate feelings of sensitive secularists), but ultimately she was no defender of individual rights and liberties.
She may have been initially, but later was no defender of capitalism and free markets, but an unholy herald for those who would exploit and rape markets, companies, even whole nations. She is a siren luring the naive onto the rocks of a cruel type of hedonism that would make husband leave wife, wife leave husband, families leave behind their elderly and infirm, abandon handicapped children, walk away from siblings and regard friendship, so important and cherished by Socrates (check out Xenophon’s Memorabilia), as an end to personal means (money, sex, power over others) and nothing else.
Interview with Mike Wallace Part 1
Interview with Mike Wallace Part 2
Interview with Mike Wallace Part 3
This hedonism of Ms. Rand is not of the non-Deontological system of realizing such pleasures as espoused by that great man of uprightness and morals, Epicurus. The pleasures and joys of her philosophy are the very vices Epicurus loathed, and urged his followers to eschew. Lucretius made poesy reviling rude and rustic superstitions of revealed religion, he exhorted his readers to embrace reason, moderation, and piety little pleasing to the ears of Stoics or Christians, but a piety that demanded sober living in a cosmos not intended for self destructiveness. No, Ayn Rand’s ideology is as repulsive to the believing Epicurean as it is to the Orthodox Christian, the Platonist or the Stoic.
In 1933 the Soviet thug and dictator Joseph St*lin decided to solve the problem of dissent and resistance in Ukraine by creating a famine and starving some seven million people to death. There are a dwindling few survivors of the horrors. For some reason, one gets the impression that Ms. Rand created a philosophy that would have willingly obliged the strong and mighty individual hero to do something similar, if needed, to achieve an extreme manifestation of individuality similar to that achieved by the USSR’s “Man of Steel.” Though she did speak out against Communism, and often eloquently too, one wonders if her philosophy was any less disdainful of the mass of humanity.
Atlas does not hold up the cosmos to serve the wants of the decadent and debauched. He carries the weight of all created essence on his back in the service of an infinitely greater, higher cause than Ayn Rand’s man the triumphant appetite. To Rand’s poisonous philosophy Atlas gives a shrug.
November 17, 2009 at 02:42
A counselor in my school who was very supportive to me in my teen years was a huge devotee of Ayn Rand. I could never slog through the two-dimensionality of the books, and put them aside.
Only much later, getting to know her as an adult, did I see an abrasive, insensitive side to the woman that chilled me so much I aborted the reacquaintance. There must be something about Rand that appeals to people who need an excuse to let out their nastier side. I suspect she may have appealed to some independent minded women who had had it hammered into them that it was their duty to love for others, which is understandable. But the recoil to the other extreme is a depressing sight. and I couldn’t help noticing that the woman I knew had managed to surround herself, in her personal life, with sad-sack individuals that were easy to boss around.
November 17, 2009 at 19:41
Well put, as usual. My only disagreement would be about whether her novels are a fun read. I found Atlas Shrugged to be not only tedious and annoying, but also melodramatic and generally poorly written. Her philosophy is ridiculous and it amazes me how many smart people take it seriously. But I guess that folks are often looking for a way to justify their selfishness. In a post today I have a link to a very funny, albeit sophomoric, article in GQ about Ayn Rand.
November 17, 2009 at 19:47
I found her Novella, Anthem, to be a much better read probably because her style was tedious to me and more so in her longer works, but it worked in what was a shorter length book. I knew that the end was in sight anyway.
November 23, 2009 at 15:54
Anthem and We The Living are her best books, by far. I think the messages behind The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are what makes them popular, not the writing. I made it through both of those books and let me tell you, they were a chore.
What some, like me, like about Ayn Rand is her staunch defense of capitalism, her opposition to collectivism and communism, and a belief that the government which governs least is that which governs best.
However, being a Christian who strives to treat everyone with decency and respect, much of the rest of Ms. Rand’s philosophy is odious, to say the least.