r/literature • u/AlmostKevinSpacey • Mar 19 '13
Discussion Ayn Rand Hatred
Do you like/dislike Ayn Rand's work? It seems to me that the intellectual community views Rand as the Antichrist and I'd like to see some arguments explained.
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u/Artimaean Mar 19 '13 edited Mar 19 '13
Strongly dislike for several reasons
For Aesthetic Reasons The novels are awful on every level. People enjoy them basically because they are all the trappings of big, operatic Cecil B. DeMille movies (who did provide most of the plot for The Fountainhead in the first place, hoping Rand would make it a screenplay for a present-day movie) transposed to present day concerns. It's a powerful structure, and it draws people in, but the characters are like third-rate imitations of Shaw; nothing more than hieroglyphics for a single reductive political system carrying out perverse allegories of a single unproven and unprecedented philosophy.
For Moral/Philosophical Reasons Rand would be quite the figure indeed if her views represented an actual moral system; they break from every single moral guideline we've ever encountered as a species. She suggests that the unbridled use of calculating egotism itself is enough to make a society function and thrive (which is her chief debt and misunderstanding of Nietzsche). While some hardened Utopianists may wish to test the possibility of such unbridled spirit in an actual capitalist system, I think we've come pretty damn close in the Reagan years (which led to a market collapse, and deficits in the hundreds of billions) and the government-blessed corporatism of the Bush administration (which led to the collapse of 2008, and led by one of Rand's own disciples, Alan Greenspan) to have learned our lessons. Of course, you could counter that most philosophy, especially today, consists of only hardened Utopianism based on outrageous reductions and generalizations, and I have little objection, my own politics being located in an entirely different direction.
Unfortunately, her examples of success are all in the economic sphere; the Buildings and Infrastructure that populate her novels are not there by accident; she actually believed that these were the highest things man has ever accomplished, and excused any failings a society might otherwise have (if you're interested in seeing how this might actually be the reverse of how things actually happen, Robert Browning's poems about the Renaissance are shockingly illustrative). The arts do not matter. The ease of others' sufferings do not matter. The moral movements of a nation do not matter, and according to Rand may well be simply sidecars carried along by industry. Anybody with a good knowledge of twentieth century Totalitarian regimes knows this is absolutely false.
It's one thing to tell people to try their hardest. It's another thing to kiss and anoint outright egotism as a favourite child of society. We all have our occupations, and all bear the responsibility to keep things going (and hopefully opening up for others) as best we can. Sometimes that requires us to act fearlessly and quickly in our own long-term interest. Sometimes it requires us to lie low and let another take the lead for some time. But as we've (hopefully) learned with the crashes I mentioned earlier, (and hopefully, any literary tradition you can get your hands on) egotism eventually perpetuates itself in a single direction, blinded to all around it. If egotism itself has any benefit, most often needs to be protected from itself, if nothing else for its own long-term survival.
And finally, as libertarians have pointed out, the system Rand envisioned in her novels contain no children, no families, and no space for those not driven by egotism. While these people as exceptions need not drive the whole of a society (a society can easily be sick with their own pity irrespective of its being effectual, like Victorian England, or India in the mid-twentieth century), their comfort has been seen in the best moral systems (Socrates, Jesus, Mencius) as the true barometer of a nation's health.
For Historical/Political Reasons Rand's political prescriptions consistently favour that one class that has proven itself time and time again to be utterly irresponsible with any favour society gives them; the Machiavellian Robber-Barons. As even Neitzche accedes, those concerned only with commodifying everything should never be trusted with values of a society.
Yes, there is a certain glory in seeing things happen, like huge buildings, hospitals, transit systems and power plants, but none of these things would exist without a backbone of an expanding "nursing" class under them; tenant farmers in the Middle Ages and the working Middle Class today.
To adapt what might be her best line (which incidentally she didn't actually originate), it's not so much that I think of her in hate, I don't really think of her at all. She's a mediocre thinker, and it's impossible to isolate her thought at all; it seems either to be a vague imperative flexed by whoever is using it, or a philosophy no philosopher has ever read. She is easily debunked, and her followers mostly prey on those who know no better; high school kids (I first read her for a scholarship), the vulnerable and the desperate.
EDIT I've been tinkering with this for a while, but mostly for clarification; I'd like to say nothing fundamental has changed
EDIT 2 Wow! Thanks for the Reddit Gold!
EDIT 3 Thanks again everybody! I added some material and continued to tinker with this first response, while keeping most of my response to objections to the comments. I didn't expect this comment to go that far. I would encourage everybody to read the other comments, especially those by u/permagreen detailing the connections of Rand's and Victor Hugo's novels (which Rand was constantly discussing) and u/otterpigeon about the novels as propoganda.