Ayn Rand is Not the Answer

George Will once wrote a sophomoric paean to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and her windy polemic, “Atlas Shrugged.” It should not go unanswered.

Will did get one thing right:  Rand’s writings are an established rite of passage for legions of the educated young. This former undergraduate made the journey well before “Atlas” was published, and the steady sales of her works a half-century later show that the phenomenon continues.

But eventually we are supposed to put away childish things, and Will’s 2010 endorsement of a Wisconsin senatorial candidate who has yet to do so (he calls Rand’s 1,100 page fictional opus his “foundational” book), demonstrates that at least two nominal adults have not. Count Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chair for four Presidents and noted Rand acolyte, as a third.

Who is Ayn Rand, and why does she so captivate many of our kids and not a few influential grown-ups? Born Alicia Rosenbaum in Tsarist Russia’s ebbing days, she fled the horrors of Marxist collectivism when still an adolescent and fashioned a new life, name and philosophy in America exactly the opposite of what she had abandoned..  There is nothing to criticise about that; all praise, in fact.

From her earliest writings Rand championed an absolute individualism and the heroic in man. Her first, still successful novel, “The Fountainhead,” celebrated fidelity to artistic integrity and thrilled this writer to the marrow of his freshman bones. In a tempered way it still does.  We should honor the creative among us -- artist, inventor, scientific genius -- and cut them a little slack when they single mindedly follow their muse to the exclusion of life's normal responsibilities shouldered by more ordinary folks.

That 1943 work is still Ayn Rand’s best; its well developed characters and plot stand in stark contrast to the stick figures that populate the didactic and gimmicky “Atlas.” Through one of her Fountainhead protagonists she demonstrates the corrosive effect of power on those who seek self worth through its exercise. Through another she illuminates the folly of living for the approval of others. Through her heroine she paints the futility of dispair over a world that places no value on personal integrity. Through her hero, an architect, she showed what a driven genius with no need or desire to serve anyone could create for us all -- and why he need not care that what he does is valued by others.

Where, then, did  Rand get it wrong? When she moved from demonstrating that the artist must be his own man to do his best work to attempting to dress economic and political actors in the same philosophical garb. When, in other words, she expanded the theory of the transcendent individual applied to the special and appropriate case of  creative expression, to encompass the life of the whole of society.

It is natural and necessary for the adolescent to strive to be an independent person. Society functions best when it is well stocked with mature individuals of integrity. But the basic unit of humankind is the family. Our children learn how to leave the nest in order to build another.  (As another philisopher said, " No man is an island.")

In “Atlas Shrugged” there is exactly one reference to raising children, and that an obvious after thought. Nor are there any old folks in need of care. All the heroes are tall and striking with minds to match. The cripple and the deviant need not apply. Exit, for example, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.

All of us, without exception, have only to live long enough to be dependent on others at least twice in our lives.  This is a bedrock fact overlooked by followers of the Randian creed. Nor is there room in their philosophy for organized help for innocent victims of hurricanes, oil spills, economic booms and busts, technological change, wars, accidents and disease.  Altruism is their favorite four letter word.  Because they do not care to live for and through others,  they would eschew all empathy as empty sentiment, all calls for social justice as special pleading for the undeserving, all collaboration as theft from the creative.

There is valid tension between the individual and society, between man and state, and – fatefully – between humankind and nature. Resolution of these opposites will be forever a work in progress, within our breasts and our many tribes, and the continuing responsibility of those we send to places like Washington, DC.

They will need to take more than one book with them, and an open mind wouldn’t hurt.. Rapturous Randian followers might profit from reading “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” a compassionate biography by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 1986) available new and used via http://www.bookfind.com/.  Another, more recent and dispasionate account of Ayn Rand's life and philosophy is the recent "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Jennifer Burns. 

They will learn, to their surprise, that their exalted hero is all too human, though just as fascinating and smart as they thought she was. One example of her occasioal lapse into human failing: she refused to countenance probability theory -- the basis of mundane statistical inference and and more esoteric quantum physics -- as a sufficiently rigorous method of logical reasoning until the day she was informed that, after a lifetime of constant smoking, she had not beaten the odds.

She crushed the fire from her cigarette and never lit another, though in the end, pneumonia and the absence of an excised lung, is what killed her.   Obviously any man with the surname, Will, has to go for that.