The Legacy of Ayn Rand by Chuck Colson

[HomeschoolrsRUs]

http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/ChuckColson/2007/10/16/the_legacy_of_ayn_rand

The Legacy of Ayn Rand

In his new memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan reminds us that author Ayn Rand is still influencing the world. He credits her with turning him into something more than a “math junkie.”

Greenspan is not alone.

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In Atlas Shrugged and her other writings, Rand articulated a philosophy she called “objectivism.” Among other things, objectivism teaches that man’s “highest value” and “moral purpose” is his own happiness.

[ThomasMore]

Colson is mostly on-target, and his criticisms of Rand are also mine.

One minor quibble. Rand views outside demands for altruistic behavior to be extortion against one's own values -- and in some cases, this is true.

She also gave examples of helping those in need, who were deserving. She described this as being consistent with rational self-interest.

In this regard, her views mirror conservatives'.

However, her focus was entirely based on the current value of the recipient, not the hope of things to come or the person's intrinsic value as God's creation -- an explicitly atheist and egoistic world view.

[DesertFox]

I noted almost the same thing about Rand's personality in another thread about her somewhere on the forum. I noted that she had a modern liberal personality that, contrary to Colson, led her to betray her own premises. She had openly said that her husband Frank O'Connor was a Howard Roark type, and he wasn't. Never had been. O'Connor was an alcoholic whom Rand kept around because she didn't want to look bad by divorcing him after lying about him.

Rand indeed had a totalitarian personality and a barren character. She was mentally brilliant, but as so many Eastern European intellectuals, was hidebound by her own self-worship.

[ThomasMore]

She had openly said that her husband Frank O'Connor was a Howard Roark type, and he wasn't. Never had been. O'Connor was an alcoholic whom Rand kept around because she didn't want to look bad by divorcing him after lying about him.


Ironic. She wouldn't divorce him (to protect her own ego), but she would cheat openly on him and justify it as right and good.

[ThomasMore]

I noted almost the same thing about Rand's personality in another thread about her somewhere on the forum. I noted that she had a modern liberal personality that, contrary to Colson, led her to betray her own premises.

...

Rand indeed had a totalitarian personality and a barren character. She was mentally brilliant, but as so many Eastern European intellectuals, was hidebound by her own self-worship.

In 1957, Whittaker Chambers wrote a scathing review of Atlas Shrugged: Big Sister is Watching You (http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp). The fact that it was Chambers who wrote the review makes the words even more compelling. Rand emigrated from the Soviet Union, and hated Soviet collectivism. Chambers had been a communist and a Soviet spy. He defected and became a staunch defender of Christianity and of conservative ideas.

[Atlas Shrugged] reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides.

...

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word.

...

Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's "last men,"

...


So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book's last line, that a character traces in the dirt, over the desolate earth," the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the "mysticism of mind" and the "mysticism of muscle").

That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative...More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value," "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous "cash-payment."'

Atlas Shrugged...is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message...a forthright philosophic materialism.

...

Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his fife."


Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being" With productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if Man's heroism" (some will prefer to say: human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held "heroic" in order not to be beastly.

...

Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls "productive achievement" man's noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau.

...

Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

...

The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. ... In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example.

[DesertFox]

Thanks for finding that, Thomas. Whittaker Chambers was a genuine hero and his insights profound.