The Anger of Compassion

Ayn Rand: At One Hundred Years, A Bit of Sense

It's like a radiation leak: You can't see the danger, but you know it's there.

So writes Julia Keller in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:

There it sits, a thick rectangle whose soft sides -- it's made of paper, after all, ordinary paper -- belie the harsh astringency within.

You sense the need to keep an eye on it. You can't just leave it there on a corner of your desktop as if it were an ordinary book, letting it cool its heels amid the messy papers and dried-up pens and the dark-chocolate wafer of your laptop.

No telling what it might do, this paperback copy of "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) by Ayn Rand, all 1,069 pages of it. No telling what impact it might have on the desk's detritus or the rest of the room.

Rand, of course, would adore the notion that the novel she began writing six decades ago, right after she'd wrapped up "The Fountainhead" (1943), still is regarded as perilous and possibly even lethal -- lethal, that is, to complacency and lazy thinking and easy goals.

(Speaking of the results of lazy and complacent, I wonder how many Tribune corporate officers and directors know just how many steps it takes to get from the Tribune.com page to an actual Chicago Tribune page? Just askin.')

This Wednesday, you can celebrate -- in your own way -- what would have been Ayn Rand's one-hundredth birthday. And you won't be the only one celebrating.

Certainly her publishers will consider a celebration: none of her books have ever gone out of print. In Irvine, California, the Ayn Rand Institute will will host a reception Wednesday evening at which [Ayn Rand biographer Jeff] Britting, the institute's archivist, and others will talk about Rand and present an exhibition on her." This according to Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who notes that there will be

a symposium on her work Wednesday morning in the Members of Congress Room at the Library of Congress' Jefferson Building.

Sponsored by the Objectivist Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., one of the two major keepers of the Rand flame, its speakers will include Reps. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) and Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), and Howard Dickman, assistant chairman of programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I don't know...two Republican Congresscritters, and an official of the unconstitutional National Endowment for the Humanities, holding a symposium at, of all places the odious Library of Congress, on the anti-statist Ayn Rand? Forgive me, I'm east coast born and raised but I'd prefer to be at the Irvine event.

Forget for the moment, though, any discomfort with particular institutions or officials. Has Ayn Rand, asks Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, gone mainstream?

The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, "The Incredibles." And Wednesday, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress--an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist.

In her day, Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing attitude in American society. She infuriated liberals by preaching economic laissez-faire and lionizing titans of business. She appalled conservatives by rejecting religion in any form while celebrating, in her words, "sexual enjoyment as an end in itself."

"End in itself?" Well now...Rand certainly was right about sexual enjoyment...and about the absolute value of human rights, each individual human being existing as a unique, irreplaceable creature...right about the moral and practical value to human lives of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism...right about the moral equivalence of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, each in its own way standing as evil beyond redemption...right about the incomparable value of Aristotle's explication of the laws of thought...right about the unity of epistemology and ethics, and about how morality can be grounded in reason, rather than in obeisance to an unseen god...right about finding value in Schiller and Hugo and lipstick and dancing and Rachmaninoff and cats and in productive achievement and, most importantly of all, in the achievement of one's own happiness.

For Ayn Rand was right about quite a few things.

"Rand emerged," continues Chapman

in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II--which were taken as proof that the free market was obsolete, that prosperity required an all-intrusive government, and that national success demanded the subordination of the individual to collective purposes. After the traumas of the 1930s and '40s, America was intent on building a well-ordered welfare state based on compromise and consensus.

In that setting, Rand resembled the female athlete in Apple Computer's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, who sprinted into a mass assembly of oppressed drones to hurl a sledgehammer at the Big Brother orating from a giant TV screen--smashing it and bathing the audience in a dazzling light.

Rand, a Russian immigrant, saw herself as harking back to the Enlightenment values of reason, limited government and personal liberty that fueled the American Revolution. "The United States was the first moral society in history," she declared.

"The United States was the first moral society in history." Consider that.

Please: do consider that. At length.

When in 1975 the brilliant Monty Python comedy troupe were filming their Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they sought permission from Britain's National Trust to shoot certain scenes at a number of ancient sites in England and Scotland. All such requests were denied, according to Python member and Holy Grail director Terry Gilliam, because the scenes they intended to shoot showed inadequate respect for the history of those sites. And yet, as I saw him assert, laughing, in a television interview, these castles and so forth were the sites of vicious intrigue and betrayal, of hideous bloodletting. Let me ask you: do we English speakers not revere Shakespeare today? And what are King Lear and Richard III and Macbeth all about?

Well?

The first moral society in history, Rand claims. That was the United States of America -- and she allowed for the contradiction of chattel slavery, which, it is not difficult to point out, has not existed in the United States (except for the obscenities of military conscription and the federal income tax) since 1865. So -- yes, Ayn Rand is right on this one as well: the United States was the first moral society in history.

But do any Americans of achievement, in their turn, admire Ayn Rand? Well, yes...Alan Greenspan, Gerald R. Ford, Cal Ripken, Ludwig von Mises, Clarence Thomas, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Henry Hazlitt, Deems Taylor, Frank Lloyd Wright...yes, I think it's safe to say that Americans of considerable talent and achievement have, in their turn, admired Ayn Rand. Safe indeed.

You might ask, though, just what does it, any of it, mean? Let's check back in with Julia Keller's story:

"Her impact is large and goes well beyond the world of literature," declares Mimi Gladstein, chair of the department of theater, dance and film at the University of Texas at El Paso, who has written two books and co-written a third about Rand's work. "I do think she's being taken more seriously now."

I think so, too, and Mimi Reisel Gladstein is partly responsible for that. My own interview with Dr. Gladstein may be read here. I asked her about the traditional academic response to Ayn Rand:

(me): Are there any barriers or pitfalls that still exist there?

Gladstein: In the academy? Well, that kneejerk reaction is still there: “Ayn Rand? Why are you writing about her? She’s such a fascist!”

(me): Which is ironic, since in literature, you get writers such as Pound, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Mishima —

Gladstein: Who were real fascists —

(me) Yes, and who are yet viewed as possessing real literary merit — but not Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is just beyond the pale. Is that why, do you think? Is it just political bias against her?

Gladstein: (Slowly) Yeah, I think so. I don’t know what the percentage is, but university professors are overwhelmingly left-wing. So those biases are there. But Pound and Mishima are already in the texts. (Shrugs.)

"Already in the texts," says the somewhat frustrated Dr. Gladstein (a real sweetheart, I must say: I owe her a cup of coffee). But "this much, at least," writes Julia Kenner, "is irrefutable:

"Atlas Shrugged" grabs hold of you and shakes you up and challenges everything you thought you believed about the world, about God, about good and evil. That's why it can't be exiled to a corner of your desk, where its slightly curled-back cover looks, in the right light, like a tiny sneer of reproach: How dare you not be reading me now, this minute. How dare you.

Well, yes...how dare you, indeed, read the not-yet-quite-mainstream Ayn Rand. And for that, I'll let Ms. Kenner have the last words:

Read at the right moment in one's life -- usually in late adolescence, when the world seems like a tangled mess of hypocrisy and confusion, and you hate your parents and especially that stupid assistant principal who is seriously on your case -- "Atlas Shrugged" is a tonic, a dream, a throat-scalding draft of pure, radiant clarity. You feel as if you've been walking upside down for most of your life, seeing things the wrong way, and now -- now -- suddenly you're right-side up again and everything starts to make sense. Turns out it was the world that was upside down, not you.

But here's the funny thing: Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 is not what you thought it would be. It's not a "Oh, wow, what a chump I was!" feeling. In fact, the ideas from "Atlas Shrugged" you thought you had outgrown don't seem all that outlandish, after all. The themes you abandoned as hopelessly naive and almost comically operatic -- all those fist-shaking tirades about human destiny, all those "Greed is good!" screeds that predate Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" by three decades -- somehow start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits.

A bit of sense, indeed.

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, one hundred years ago this Wednesday.

Posted by Craig Ceely at January 31, 2005 12:43 AM