The Worst Conservative Classic
Posted on June 26th, 2009
by Jordan Smith |
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To answer George’s question, the worst conservative ‘classic’ is either Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead. Each fails on both aesthetic and philosophical grounds. Ayn Rand was an unusually shallow thinker and a terrible fictionist. Her eternal popularity is a testament to the poor tastes of libertarians everywhere. As Francis Fukuyama once put it, “Ayn Rand’s ideas appeal to mostly male adolescents and is not a serious approach that can be dignified by the word “philosophy.” Or literature.
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You must be joking! Ayn Rand was not the most sophisticated philosopher, but her work should not be dismissed this easily.
She managed to merge capitalism, individualism, and self-dignity, into an unapologetic, coherent philosophy which has inspired millions to pursue their dreams and advocate for greater liberty. And she managed to clearly convey that philosophy in fiction which was accessible and inspiring. Admittedly, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are too long, but they do not fail as philosophy or literature.
Without her work, the libertarian/conservative movement would not nearly as strong as it is today. For this reason alone, she is worth reading.
Many people confuse their inability to understand complex arguments with shallowness on the part of the proponents of those arguments. So don’t worry. You aren’t the first to make that mistake and won’t be last. Of course, Atlas is not conservative and Ayn would be embarrassed to be classified as a conservative — and rightfully so.
Blake… While I am happy to hear you defend Rand, how can you start off your defense by stating that she “…is not the most sophisticated philosopher…”??
If you mean that she did not practice ’sophistry’ (intellectual pretention) then I would agree, but that was niether the tone, nor the implied intent of your ‘defense.’
As Leonard Peikoff once explained it, Ms.Rand can grasp the highest conseptual abstractions in the same way as you and I can grasp the concept of the word ‘table.’
Rand, or course, was not a conservative nor a libertarian although some conservatives and libertarians toy with some of her ideas. In fact she wrote an essay entitled “Conservatism: An Obituary” and disparaged libertarians as”hippies of the right”. Most Objectivists I know (1) support a woman’s rights to have an abortion (2) favor very liberal immigration laws (3) favor a strongly assertive foreign policy (4) are atheists, etc.
As for the unsupported, arbitrary claim that she was a shallow thinker and terrible writer one should wonder why she has had such an impact. I discovered Ayn Rand at age 20. I am now a 65 year old college professor and her ideas still guide my life
Don’t read either Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead if you want some conservative reading. They are radical, fundamental, non-conservative novels of the highest caliber. Ayn Rand was a genius and, as such, is not appreciated by many, who cannot understand the meaning of her works. However, if you want to read something uplifting and inspiring in a non-religious context, either of them will fulfill your wildest dreams. They do require you to think, it should be noted.
Holy cow, you must be living on a different planet. Have you even read Rand.
There is nothing to say to you. She needs NO defense. The future, and I hope I am alive to witness it, will hold Ayn Rand as the savior of the human race. She was and is that important. More so than Aristotle.
It the likes of you that have caused the mess we are in.
Ayn Rand (nee Alyssa Rosenbaum) was,to her credit, a competent novelist very much in the Russian tradition-Romantic and long winded, that is. She was also an obsessed air castle architect who concocted her own system of reality, much like L Ron Hubbard.
Indeed , the parallels between Rand and Hubbard are striking. Both synthesized, or decocted, an immense and richly detailed conception of (what each upheld as) reality from a small number of sources-Randism is Isabel Paterson blended with an oddly selected dose of Aristotle, Scientology is General Semantics applied to Crowleyanity, and both sought and achieved a cultlike following of people one would not have expeted to become cultists.
As a philosopher, she was a passable novelist, which is more than Hubbard can say. Hubbard wrote an immense quantity of pulp science fiction, none of it terribly good, and most of it absolute trash.
Both Objectivism and Scientology live on today, their practitioners oblivious to their idols’ defects. At first glance, it would appear Hubbard’s brand the more pernicious, but it’s arguable Rand was the more destructive.
Ayn Rand was one of the most fascinating thinkers of our time. To dismiss her as “shallow” is to confess to either having not read her,or, to have only read her superficially.
Clarity is not the same as shallowness.
It is true that she never published a lengthy, in depth, non-fiction philosophical explanation; in fact she communicated much of her thought, in breath taking detail, orally.
And she opened up so many avenues of thought that COULD take up volumes.
A few random examples:
The relationship between force and mind.
Life as the standard of value.
The relationship between subconscious ideas and conscious philosophical ideas (which she called, “psychoepistemology.”)
“The Sanction of the Victim.”
The problem of universals.
The “pregnancy” of metaphysics.
She left us with a rich vein of thought to explore in so many areas. But she certainly would have cautioned that reason was the only method of exploring these and any other issue.
Because of her adherence to that method, fundamentally she was not a conservative or a Libertarian.
Why don’t we go to the videotape? Here’s a couple of passages for you to judge whether she was shallow and a poor writer:
1. From the Fountainhead:
“The men in the drafting rooms loved Peter Keating. He made them feel as if he had been there for a long time; he had always known how to become part of any place he entered; he came soft and bright as a sponge to be filled, unresisting, with the air and the mood of the place. His warm smile, his gay voice, the easy shrug of his shoulders seemed to say that nothing weighed too much within his soul and so he was not one to blame, to demand, to accuse anything.
“As he sat now, watching Francon read the article, Francon raised his head to glance at him. Francon saw two eyes looking at him with immense approval–and two bright little points of contempt in the corners of Keating’s mouth, like two musical notes of laughter visible the second before they were to be heard. Francon felt a great wave of comfort. The comfort came from the contempt. The approval, together with that wise half-smile, granted him a grandeur he did not have to earn; a blind admiration would have been precarious; a deserved admiration would have been a responsibility; an undeserved admiration was precious.”
2. From Atlas Shrugged:
“She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
“She thought: For just a few moments — while this lasts — it is all right to surrender completely — to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go — drop the controls — this is it.”
3. From Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:
“The above is a general description of the nature of concepts as products of a certain mental process. But *the* question of epistemology is what precisely is the nature of that process? To what precisely do concepts refer in reality?
“Let us now examine the process of forming the simplest concept, the concept of a single attribute (chronologically, this is not the first concept that a child would grasp but it is the simplest one epistemologically)–for instance, the concept ‘*length*.’ If a child considers a match, a pencil and a stick, he observes that length is the attribute they have in common, but their specific lengths differ. *The difference is one of measurement*. In order to form the concept ‘length,’ the child’s mind retains the attribute and omits its particular measurements. Or, more precisely, if the process were identified in words, it would consist of the following ‘Length must exist in *some* quantity, but may exist in *any* quantity. I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity.’
“The child does not think in such words (he has, as yet, no knowledge of words), but *that* is the nature of the process which his mind performs wordlessly. And that is the principle which his mind follows, when, having grasped the concept ‘length,’ by observing the three objects, he uses it to identify the attribute of length in a piece of string, a ribbon, a belt, a corridor or a street.”
I couldn’t disagree more with Jordan on this point. Ayn Rand is the brightest, most important light of the 20th century, and her ideas have only just begun to be understood and spread.
Finally, someone who gave a moral, secular argument for freedom and Capitalism, with a foundation in reason - a glorious hymn to the future intellectual.
It amazes me that so-called Conservatives continue to trash the only intellectual ammunition they have to resurrect the embers of their dying beliefs.
Was this post linked by an Objectivist website? The zealotry of some of these defenses of Rand are breathtaking. Savior of the human race?
Love her or hate her, Ayn Rand’s contribution has been of enormous influence in defense of capitalism and individualism, only matched, I think, by the damage caused to each idea’s moral credibility from the ease with which leftists can portray her radical conclusions as the boogeyman of ordinary people’s tredpidations about both concepts.
Ha, someone pissed off the fanboys. Brighter than Aristotle, indeed.
Here is a rather amusing account of the cultish atmosphere of Objectivism by Murray Rothbard:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html