Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged
“It is not a novel that should be thrown aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force.”
Dorothy Parker about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Disclaimer: I say from the beginning, I have not read the book. I was advised to read it, and I got as far as Wikipedia. Which raises the question, why do I write about Ayn Rand? Thanks for asking ... she coined one of my favourite aphorisms, which features very early on in my book en.light.en.ment, namely on page III:
Ayn Rand
Wikipedia: Atlas Shrugged. Kirkus
review "... and one can count, too, on ... the intellectual snob appeal of those who like to feel they've plumbed a new
code of ethics ..."
The novel was
generally disliked by critics. Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote
that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the
cleverest put-downs".
One called it "execrable claptrap", while
another said it showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". In
the Saturday Review, Helen Beal Woodward said that the novel was written
with "dazzling virtuosity" but was "shot through with
hatred".
Granville Hicks in The New York Times Book Review, said the book was "written out of hate".
The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman - in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?"
In the National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric" and "remarkably silly", and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term".
The writer John Rogers said: "There are
two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the
Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a
lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally
stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The
other, of course, involves orcs."
"The so-called philosophy of Ayn Rand, known as Objectivism, has become a rather odious cult in the United States. Europeans find it baffling, while academic philosophers use it as opening for easy jokes. If a philosophy conference is getting especially dull and grim you can simply say the name Ayn Rand and you will get at least a few amusing jabs at her.
"Followers of Rand are
impervious to any criticisms of her work however. When one mentions the obvious
problems and contradictions in her work they are greeted with an almost
religious parroting of her maxims. Maxims are really all they are (and
I am grateful for one of them, see above, CB) because Rand rarely gives
justification for any of her claims but simply states her point of view as
emphatically as possible and then she (or her followers) accuses anybody who
disagrees as being irrational ..."
The article is lengthy, very lengthy (and obviously controversial) ... but enlightening reading nonetheless, for anyone interested in philosophy and epistemology (the theory of knowledge; epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion).
Objectivism (Wikipedia):
"Objectivism's central tenets are that
reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct
contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective
knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and
inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of
one's own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system
consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual
rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism ...
"Academic philosophers have mostly ignored or
rejected Rand's philosophy. Nonetheless, Objectivism has been a significant
influence among libertarians and American conservatives."
The reason why I was interested in
Objectivism is that Rand characterized it as "a philosophy for living
on earth", grounded in reality, and aimed at defining human nature and the
nature of the world in which we live. The name "Objectivism" derives
from the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are
determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one's mind, and are
not created by the thoughts one has.
The reason why I am blindsided by
Rand is that this seems ever so reasonable ... until one realises that at the
core of her philosophy is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his
own happiness as the moral purpose of his life", which leads to
laissez-faire capitalism with its denial of altruism. Conservatives and
libertarians (in America politician Paul Ryan and Justice Clarence Thomas)
wallow in this sort of unsociable ideology.