The Problem with Ayn Rand

There’s been talk of making Atlas Shrugged into a movie, so that’s led to a resurrection of Ayn Rand’s work that’s worth addressing here. A quick précis for the forgetful: Russian émigré active in the middle 20^th century in New York, writer of fiction and essays, darling of the John Birch-ish set to the far right (whatever that means,) famous for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged – two really long novels that feature an independent protagonist against the corrupt machine, stormy personal life, cult-like following under the name “objectivism,” died in 1982.

She is famous as the most famous in a long history of (what we would now call,) Libertarian figures that argued for the individual in contrast to the collective. So far so good; she does share certain qualities with the Freidman and Hayek and Buckley and Ron Paul and even echoes distantly back to Friedrich Nietzsche. However, there have always been a few things that disturbed me.

First there’s her writing: While passable as an essayist, her novels are overextended to the point of unreadable. She breaks every (non-political) fiction rule in the book giving cardboard characters simple motivations and stiff dialogue, while describing vaguely emotions and actions instead of showing them vividly. This is a body that screams out for an editor. Atlas Shrugged could probably have been a fantastic book – if only it’d had the 800 unnecessary pages cut out of it.

Then there’s the approach: Ms. Rand’s signature phrases revolve around “reason,” and “objectivity.” The idea is the there is only one right answer and anyone with half a brain can arrive at it quickly. An admirable goal, to be sure, but it always struck me as a bizarre irony that many of her conclusions seemed straight out of the arguably anti-reason and anti-objective Nietzsche. His assertion was that picking an answer was usually preferable to which, and hers became that only the answer would do. There’s kind of an epistemological breakdown here that showed up in her personal life. Often “right,” became “what I want for reasons I can’t articulate.” Objective sort of implies cross-applicable to everyone, while individual is pretty much fully subjective. Perhaps this is a circle that can’t be squared.

Maybe my strongest critique is in a meaning-of-life vein. The characters in Atlas Shrugged, et al, are idealists for the cause of liberation, but for whom? Liberation for all? That doesn’t seem so much to jive with her vaunted selfishness. If there is an objectively right answer, then what is it? She never seems to go all the way to endorsing an anarchy of hedonism and conquest, yet doesn’t provide convincing reasons why not. Nietzsche, at least, was clearer about his goals and permitted methods. Maybe the idea was for the bright and privileged to stick together and lord over the meek and the sick; she may have had more in common with her ivy-league detractors that either would like to admit. What never seemed to cross the radar was the idea that altruism might have a reason for existing. It’s no end of entertaining that developments in evolutionary psychology (see no austrolipithicus is an island,) seem to show that the very impulses she argued against were the essential building blocks for survival of the species.

Actual Darwinism, it seems, wins over Social Darwinism.

[with full credit to Bill M. for the photo]