Speaking of Rand

The mention in comments earlier today of the recent Ayn Rand discussions (here and here) reminded me of something I ran across during those discussions and meant to link to, but never did. It’s an account by Michael Prescott, a former Objectivist, of why he was attracted to the philosophy in the first place, and of why he left it. On the basis of having read Atlas Shrugged and nothing else by Rand, I can say at least that he more than confirms the impression I was left with by the book. I’m tempted to quote at length but instead will just invite you to read the whole thing.

Sunday Night Journal — August 10, 2008

A Few More Notes on Ayn Rand

(Please excuse the bulleted list; there is still more to say here than I have time for, and this is a way of doing it more quickly.)

• What she got right.

• As I mentioned last week, I think she’s right to insist on appreciation and recognition of the intelligence, creativity, and labor involved in scientific and technical progress.

• She is fiercely dedicated to the truth and hates lies, lying, and liars. In Atlas Shrugged she hits very effectively the sort of lying that happens in institutions where everyone is concerned with avoiding blame—the lying that’s accomplished by euphemism, evasion, and silent agreement not to say aloud what is actually intended.

• She disdains the sort of man or woman whose only real skill is manipulating a bureaucracy for his own benefit.

• One reason the Rand phenomenon interests me is that although she and her supporters are generally looked at as being on the socio-political right and are loathed by the left, many of her fundamental beliefs cross that divide. This is an instance confirming the often-made observation that our “right” and “left” are (in general—there are many exceptions, etc. etc.) more precisely described as “right-liberal” and “left-liberal,” with “liberal” referring to 19^th century or classical liberalism, i.e. secular pragmatism. I conjecture that this does not so much prove Rand’s influence as shed light on her appeal; the American mind is already open to her philosophy. Here are some of the common features; some of them are clear ideas, some are only attitudes:

• Atheism. I mean both the hard angry atheism of Dawkins et.al. (and Rand) and the soft “spiritual but not religious” atheism of less dogmatic souls. I also mean, less obviously, the unacknowledged practical atheism of many nominal Christians for whom Christianity is mainly a vehicle for achieving practical results: social justice for the left, prosperity and freedom for the right. Both judge Christianity by its utility in “the real world,” meaning the material world.

• Individual sovereignty. I could almost say individual deification; many years ago someone wrote of “America’s evolving religion of self-worship,” and both right-liberals of Rand’s stripe and left-liberals tend toward it, seeing the individual as an “imperial self” (I can’t remember who coined that term), which appears out of nowhere owing nothing to anyone. Right-liberals emphasize this in the economic and political sphere, left-liberals in the personal sphere, especially and obsessively in all matters pertaining to sex.

• A very high regard for one’s own intelligence combined with contempt for those considered stupid, a category which includes most people. Everybody except me is an idiot is a sentiment to which intelligent young people (and of course some not so intelligent) are naturally inclined, especially when their superiority seems unrecognized and unappreciated. It’s a natural tendency, but mature people get over it. Randians and many on the political left have made it a fundamental part of their view of the world.

• Rejection of the idea of the Fall and of original sin. I don’t mean here rejection of the Christian doctrine specifically, but of the fundamental recognition that we live in an inherently flawed world and that every single human being in it is inherently flawed, a mixed bag of good and bad, true and false, strength and weakness. And that our ability to make it right is very limited.

• Incomprehension of and intolerance of disagreement. Disagreement in good faith is not possible; only wickedness and stupidity suffice to explain resistance to the obvious truth. Therefore whatever is wrong with the world is so because the stupid and wicked people will not accept my/our prescription for putting it right. This has as a corollary a burning resentment that Those Other People Are Ruining Everything. Atlas Shrugged practically boils with it. I don’t mean anger over specific words or deeds on the part of opponents, but anger that they exist at all. You see it on both sides of our political debates. I think its violent implications are not sufficiently noted.

• I make a distinction between deep and shallow atheism. The atheism of objectivism is shallow, as is apparent from the entry on atheism in the Ayn Rand Lexicon. Deep atheism understands (if only unconsciously) the problem of time and death, the human need for God, and the implications of his absence. Shallow atheism thinks all such thoughts are nonsense and a distraction from immediate material concerns. Deep atheism can produce great art. I’m not aware of any produced by shallow atheism.

• I noted the absence of humor in Atlas Shrugged. Here is Ayn Rand herself on the idea of laughing at oneself: “[To] laugh at that which is good, at heroes, at values, and above all at yourself [is] monstrous .... The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.” That needs no further comment.

• Eight or ten years ago when I drove a car with only a radio, no tape or cd player, I sometimes listened to a morning comedy show which included occasional visits from a character called Mad Max, who delivered enraged rants about everything from Bill Clinton to people who don’t use their turn signals, punctuated with—you have to imagine this in a sort of lower-class southern accent through gritted teeth—“It makes me so damn mad..” One of his standard lines was “Why don’t they just shut up and quit ruining my life?” I thought of him many times while reading Atlas Shrugged.

Edith Stein and Ayn Rand

The parallels and divergences are interesting. Both were intellectually gifted Jewish women, one born in a city which is now part of Poland, one in Petersburg (which I think, from what little I know of Russia, makes her pretty European). Rand disdained the very idea of God, came to America and had a successful career as a philosopher-novelist. Stein gave herself to God, became a Catholic and a Carmelite and a philosopher-mystic, and was swallowed up by the Nazi death machine.

Rand (actually Leonard Peikoff, her intellectual heir, by her own declaration, speaking in The Ayn Rand Lexicon):

“God” as traditionally defined is a systematic contradiction of every valid metaphysical principle. The point is wider than just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. No argument will get you from this world to a supernatural world. No reason will lead you to a world contradicting this one. No method of inference will enable you to leap from existence to a “super-existence.”

Stein:

…the fullness of the world we perceive with our senses holds more than what we can understand through the methods of natural science…..This world with all it discloses and all it conceals, it is just this world that also points beyond itself as a whole to him who “mysteriously reveals himself” through it. It is this world, with its referrings that lead us out beyond itself, that forms the intuitive basis for the arguments of natural theology.

Among the many interesting questions raised by this juxtaposition are these: which demands that more be accepted on blind faith? which stands in greater opposition to ordinary experience?

Sunday Night Journal — August 3, 2008

Ayn Rand, Crank

In a passage quoted in Leonard Peikoff’s introduction to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand reveals that she misunderstands the nature of fiction. She refers to it as “a process of translating the abstract into the concrete,” but that’s not what it is, at all. Another writer for whom English was not his native language, Joseph Conrad, gave us a far wiser description: “...art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe.”

Conrad succeeded in his aim, and so did Rand. Her mechanistic conception of fiction produced a mechanistic novel, in which the characters are puppets moved by ideological strings, forever making long clumsy speeches to each other, even when they’re supposed to be in love, and the narrative itself, in spite of its 1100-plus pages, seems a long tiresome exercise in driving home one single point. (I did think it picked up a bit after the first 900 pages, but then I came to the Slough of Despond, the 60-page ranting manifesto delivered by John Galt in a speech which would have had to last for some three hours, and which is surely among the most tiresome things ever written.)

The plot of Atlas Shrugged can be summarized briefly. The industrialists of the world become fed up with the encroachments and injustices of socialism and decide to teach the world how dependent it is on them by withdrawing from all productive activity. As they do so, their industries collapse, or in some cases are deliberately destroyed. And as the socialists try ever more desperate measures of state control and redistribution, industrial civilization disintegrates into rule by gangsters who make themselves rich in the name of the people.

I’ll grant that there is a useful point there. Regardless of whether one thinks industrialization is fundamentally a good thing or not, it has certainly been a spectacular achievement of human ingenuity and energy, and most of us—most people who will read this—live in abundance and comfort because of it. And yet we have a tendency to treat the wealth it produces as something akin to a natural resource, something that just appeared spontaneously and requires no effort to preserve, leaving us only the question of how to distribute it. It’s worthwhile to be reminded that it was the product of intelligence and an enormous amount of hard work.

But the novel which is supposed to teach us this, among other things, is, to my taste, simply lifeless. Others apparently find narrative excitement in it; I found none. Had enjoyment been my guide, I would have given up on the book after a hundred pages or so. It was sheer determination that kept me plodding on until the end. I had wanted to read it in the first place because it is apparently a very influential book, and I wanted to understand why and how—why people like it, and what it teaches them. And I insisted on finishing it because I didn’t want to state a firm opinion of it without having given it every chance. Now I can say without any qualification that I think it’s a bad novel in the service of a bad idea.

The bad idea is radical atheistic individualism or libertarianism, which sees every individual as a sovereign and competent king or queen who deals with other kings and queens on terms of pure self-interest and according to Rand’s very narrow view of rationality. The individual owes nothing to anyone, and every exchange between persons is a commercial transaction, usually in fact and always in principle. Rand’s sacred symbol—I’m not joking—is the dollar sign. She regards any sort of altruism not based on a strict exchange of value as a destructive obscenity, and likewise those who teach it, whether for religious or secular-socialist reasons.

And so she presents us with a set of characters who are clearly divided into good people and bad people. The good people are producers: strong, intelligent, competent, and lean. The bad people are parasites: weak, stupid, incompetent, and fat; again, I’m really not joking or exaggerating. And one feels that the driving force of the book is less admiration of the good people than hatred of the bad. It often feels like a vast and implacable flood of anger and contempt.

Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and therefore grew up in the early days of the Revolution. The family business was expropriated by the communists, and presumably this was the source of her rage against “the looters,” as the government’s agents of confiscation and redistribution, as well as its beneficiaries, are called in the novel.

She has been called a fascist, and she and her supporters insist that this is false and unfair. They’re right, as far as her stated convictions are concerned. She is passionately anti-collectivist and therefore no more tolerant of fascists than of communists. She explicitly and vehemently repudiates violence in any and all situations apart from defense against a direct attack. And yet I can see why people accuse her of fascism: it’s the intensity—I think it’s fair to say the violence—of her hatred and contempt for those who do not meet her standards. Here’s just one of many typical examples:

“She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence.”

Or this, the most extreme of a number of instances I marked:

“…he saw what Paul Larkin must have been at that time—a youth with an aged baby’s face, smiling ingratiatingly, joylessly, begging to be spared, pleading with the universe to give him a chance….Rearden knew what the boy he had been would have felt: a desire to step on the obscene thing which was Larkin and grind every wet bit of it out of existence.”

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the strange pathologies in evidence here. Perhaps a longer essay is in order, because I remain almost as puzzled by the book’s popularity as I was before I read it. What is it that speaks so strongly to so many people? Do most of them see themselves as one of the supermen? Do they think it might be a good thing if the word “give” were forbidden, as it is in the secret utopia of the capitalists in this novel?

Make no mistake, Atlas Shrugged, and, I assume, Rand’s work in general, is utopian. And like all utopian schemes hers must eventually come to grief on the reality of human nature, and end with the bitter conclusion that human beings are simply not worthy of it. Rand seems a sort of capitalistic and individualist inverse of Marx, falling off on the opposite side of a balanced and truly rational conception of what human beings are.

Perhaps most of the books admirers are like those who admire John Lennon’s “Imagine”—picking up only the superficial ideas and missing the implications. I think most people hear “Imagine” and think Yes, it would be nice if people stopped hating and killing, completely missing the song’s totalitarian implications. Similarly, it may be that many of the admirers of Atlas Shrugged come away thinking, Yes, enterprise and competence and personal responsibility are good things, and don’t absorb the rage and the dogma of pure self-interest.

Several hundred pages into the book I noted to myself that it contained no love, no children, and no humor. It did eventually bring in a notion of love, a rather strange and constricted sort of love which is more accurately called admiration: the producers love the work of their hands, and they get involved with each other romantically, but even their romances have a weird ideological charge, being defined as an exchange of value. And two perfect (in Randian terms) children do appear briefly in the capitalist utopia, the offspring of two perfect producers. But I never saw any humor whatsoever—no intentional humor, anyway, although some things struck me as unintentionally funny, such as the constant application of adjectives like “lean,” “hard,” “superlative,” and “incomparable” to the heroes and the heroine. (There is only one heroine, Dagny Taggart—a name which I find amusing and can’t help pronouncing as DAGNY. TAGGART. And another weird quirk of the book is that she is worshipped in turn by each of the three major heroes and gives herself to each with a submissiveness that made me wonder if the sequel to Atlas Shrugged is The Story of O.)

Humorlessness is one of the characteristics of a crank, and judging by Atlas Shrugged a crank is what Ayn Rand was: not stupid, but narrow and shrill; not entirely wrong, but fixated on one inadequate idea which she thinks can explain everything; hostile to and uncomprehending of any disagreement. Believing that she has absorbed all philosophy and religion and that almost all of it is nonsense, she only demonstrates how little she really understood. And like everyone who denies that there is something fundamentally and inherently amiss in the human condition, something that no mere idea or program can remedy, she ends up as one more proof of the truth she denies.