On Ayn Rand

letterstomycountry:

As I spotted JoeMcCarthyBlues discussing Ayn Rand with spry interlocutors, I was reminded of an article that Whittaker Chambers wrote for National Review in 1957, in which he essentially decimated Ayn Rand’s philosophy and literary bona fides.  It is worth quoting Chambers at length.  Here, he analyzes Rand’s use of the dollar sign as a symbol of her liberation ideology, one which, in the end, is simply Marxism turned inside out:

[Ayn Rand’s] Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand’s ideas that the good life is one which “has resolved personal worth into exchange value,” “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash-payment.’” The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: “And I mean it.” But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. 

I quote this simply to remind people that even conservative contemporaries of Rand did not like her.  They appreciated her anti-government stance, but conservatism was traditionally, above all things, an ideology of homeostasis.  Rand was essentially calling for social upheaval and revolution; which are two things that traditional conservatism opposes because existing political systems and traditions often serve invisible needs that are undetectable by external reformers.  Hence the reason why, e.g., Edmund Burke was critical of the French Revolution (whose controversial, bloody aftermath vindicated him).

With that said, I am in 100% agreement with Chambers’ critique: Rand was scarred by Communism when she was young, and as a result, developed a political ideology that was so superlative in its elevation of opposing principles that her philosophy essentially occupied the opposite side of the same coin.  Objectivism is essentially dialectical materialism and LTV (“are you not entitled to the sweat of your brow?”) dressed up in private property rights and Nietzchean ubermensch pathology.