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April 11, 2005
Ayn Rand and Me
'm not an Objectivist. Ayn Rand would likely despise me for one of those second-hander nitwits who acknowledge the existence of Soul and God, though not the Christian version of these. (Never mind that I could make a "reasonable" case for the micro-scientific method of proof.)
Ayn Rand is probably the most fervant rationalist skeptic I've read. I've taken them to task in The God Game, Part 2.
Still, every 5 to 10 years I pull out The Fountainhead and give it a good read. How can you not read a book that starts like this?
Howard Roark laughed.He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.
(I remember once holding the book somewhere in public, and an old lady saw it, pointed at it and told me, "Young man, that book is pure evil!" I smiled and left her to her "wisdom." I had already read it three times by that point and understood that the book itself explained her reaction.)
After that I take out Atlas Shrugged and give it a good read, even the 60-page polemic at the end, and like The Fountainhead find myself profoundly stimulated and profoundly moved, especially during passages where her major characters take principled stands despite the consequences.
Anyone who has not read Ayn Rand owes it to themselves to at least read The Fountainhead. I once had a friend who was a struggling architect who did not know what to do with his life. I gave him this book, and it provided him all the energy and vision he needed to turn his life around.
I know people who swear that reading Atlas Shrugged saved their lives, because they had reached a point of wondering if the political and social forces in this world were worth standing against.
I've known many young people who have discovered the value of individualism and striving for success without regard to the opinions of others.
I read Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which finally gave me a clear understanding of what real capitalism was all about, and every other fiction and non-fiction book she published. Not because I always agreed with her (I often smiled at the disagreements) but because of the clarity and power of her prose, the sincerity of her conviction, the Aristotelian structure of her arguments.
I always thought it ironic that she came out of Communist Russia as such a major voice against Collectivism, and yet granted one of its fundamental precepts--that there was nothing beyond material existence.
I also thought it ironic that for all her life-affirming philosophy, I found it near impossible to imagine her major heroic characters--Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Reardon--as having either parents or children.
Yet I've cycled around again to giving her books a good rereading, for the pleasure of it. And I recommend everyone who looks at themselves as a passionate thinker to do the same.
*** A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. Ayn Rand
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Posted by witnit at April 11, 2005 12:00 PM
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