A Few Only Slightly Connected Thoughts on Rand

1a.) This New York Times review of a new Ayn Rand biography has been getting pretty harsh treatment in the blogosphere. Most of the criticism is over this passage:

Brandon of Siris, D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty, Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy, and several other conservative and libertarian bloggers have pointed out that nothing in this passage implies a contradiction. Brandon’s is the most thorough of these rebuttals.

1b.)Brian Leiter has also criticized Kirsch, the author of the review, for claiming that there is an affinity between the thought of Rand and Nietzsche. He writes:

I’ve always found the positive comparison of Rand to Nietzsche by Randians frustrating, because I’ve never seen any affinity between the two thinkers (they seem completely incompatible, in fact, as Leiter points out), but the comparison is so common that it’s not surprising to see Kirsch invoke it. Still, I’d love to see Rand-Nietzsche meme die, and articles like this in major publications do nothing to hasten that death.

2.) I last read Rand almost 12 years ago. I read The Fountainhead in high school, and found it boring, so I had no intention of reading anything else by Rand. But when I went off to college, I met a bunch of young Randians, and people were frequently suggesting, even demanding, that I read her books. My uncle, for example, upon hearing that I was majoring in philosophy, insisted that I would love Rand (I haven‘t read any of his book suggestions since!). Others thought I would love Rand because of my affinity for Nietzsche. So, I broke down and read Atlas Shrugged.

At the time, I was working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab during the summer, and was in charge of running one of the lab’s many experiments. The experiment had to be run at the same time every day, and the cruel graduate student I was working under chose to run it at 7 am, so every morning I woke up way too early, showered, and then walked over to the lab armed only with my copy of Atlas Shrugged. I would start the experiment, and then sit and read for the 90 minutes the experiment ran. Reading for 90 minutes a day, it still took me an entire month to get through the book (Galt’s long speech was particularly slow going). That experiment and that book will forever be united in my memory as wholly unpleasant experiences.

I found the book to be worse than awful as a novel, and the philosophy it presented to be even worse than that, but thought that Rand’s obvious lack of talent as a novelist might get in the way of her presenting her philosophy, so I went to the library and checked out some of her philosophical works, The Virtue of Selfishness, i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I forced myself to read through all three, and came away even less impressed with her philosophy (if that was possible). My impressions of her philosophy ranged from finding it thoroughly uninteresting to being offended by it and horrified that she was so widely read. I sometimes wonder if, now that I’m older, my impression of her would be different were I to revisit her books, but my impression was so bad then that I don’t think it’s worth my time to find out.

3.) Anyway, since I haven’t read her or even thought about her work seriously in so long, I can’t really speak intelligently about her philosophy, but the much maligned passage in Kirsch’s review got me thinking about the issue of living the philosophical life that I wrote about last week. Did Rand live a life consistent with her philosophy? Kirsch was obviously trying to imply that she didn’t, but those more familiar with Rand’s work than I have been pretty vehement in insisting that he was wrong in the particular case he chose as an example. Still, Rand’s biographers often highlight the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her close followers, and that she herself promoted. Part of this cultish atmosphere was a complete lack of tolerance for dissent. It was Rand’s way or the highway, with she and her closest followers excommunicating even mildly dissenting members of her sect, and demanding that the remaining members cut off all contact with the excommunicated (even when they were close family members, or spouses!). As a philosopher whose most popular teaching is one of radical individualism, this does seem problematic, does it not?

Or maybe not. I wonder if the perception of Rand as a promoter of individualism is a mistaken one, and that her stifling of individual thought is therefore perfectly consistent with her philosophy. If I remember correctly, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes, Dagny Taggert, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, all thought alike, and Taggert’s affinity for Rearden was largely due to the fact that their world-views were identical. What’s more, anyone who didn’t share that world view was treated quite harshly in the novel. So maybe Rand’s individualism has less to do with thought than with action: it is about the virtue of selfishness, and acting on one’s own behalf, rather than making up one’s own mind, because for Rand, when one uses reason properly, there is only one set of conclusions that one can possibly come to. If that’s the case, to the extent that Rand’s individualism has to do with thinking for oneself, it is not thinking originally, but coming to the right conclusions independent of the destructive ideas that dominate our culture.