Perhaps the weirdest thing on the right is tolerance for the bloviating novelist Ayn Rand.
The philosophical problem with Ayn Rand is not so much her views, but that she does not argue for them. She asserts them, but when counterarguments are made there is no response. Her philosophy, such as it is, has attractive elements. Facing Soviet collectivism her praise of the individual was needed, but it comes at too high a price.
The practical problem with Rand and Objectivism is that the worldview is unworkable without being wicked.
Can the old or despised minority groups really take comfort in objectivism? The muddle of Anglo-American politics does not make for easy charts in political science class, but it has allowed for a great deal of freedom combined with a basic social safety net. We are always tempted to go too far in one direction or another, but we also have recognized that Aristotle was right: politics is not a science, but an art. Ideologies of all kinds sound good in theory, but usually kill a great many people put in practice.
What would happen to the weak if Rand triumphed? We know this: Rand herself would not have cared.
Rushing from the error of collectivism to the equally noxious error of barbaric individualism was a futile attempt to solve one vice with another vice. Putting Lenin and Rand in a room would not give us Baby Moderation, but a bloody room.
Rand dismissed religion of course as opposed to “reason,” but was unreasonable in doing so. She never considered Aquinas let alone modern philosophers of religion who found her views naive.
Rand’s Utopian view that if we were all selfish enough, we would all flourish as human beings is contradicted by her own ugly and unhappy life.
I have not argued against Rand just stated my opinion with a few reasons for it, of course, but I do wonder at her popularity. She is not a great writer, she is not a great thinker, she says nothing new, and her views are not workable.
Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
November 13th, 2009 | 12:43 pm | #1
So you’re saying you wouldn’t blog on an Objectivist site then, JMR?
I think I’m with ya. Just checkin’.
November 13th, 2009 | 1:03 pm | #2
I might blog there . . . I am willing to dialog with just about anyone (no Nazis, no Communists, no racists . . . ), but it would depend on the conditions.
I would not blog there if I had to take Rand as the prophet or even a good person . . . or even a philosopher. She has followers, so she must be taken seriously, but I refuse to do much else.
November 13th, 2009 | 1:22 pm | #3
I still think Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged (from Nat’l Review, Dec 28, 1957) is the definitive dismantling of Ayn Rand:
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp
November 13th, 2009 | 1:39 pm | #4
I got in a huge argument about her ideas recently.
As far as I’m concerned, Rand has no conception whatsoever of what humanity really is.
November 13th, 2009 | 5:51 pm | #5
She never considered Aquinas let alone modern philosophers of religion who found her views naive.
FWIW, she was going to include a character in Atlas Shrugged who was a down-the-line Thomist philosopher. Somewhere along the way, his thinking would lead him to, basically, objectivism. At that point, he would join “the strike” (since the world would come to a screeching halt without Thomist philosophers). Her given reason for leaving this character out of the book was that including him would be giving a sort of mild affirmation to certain forms of religion, which she didn’t want to do. I suspect that, deep down inside, she left the guy out because it began to occur to her that she couldn’t win that argument.
November 13th, 2009 | 7:05 pm | #6
After reading John Gray’s “Black Mass”, my thoughts about objectivism are about the same as for any of the other post-enlightenment ideas — only that she has not yet produced any death as did Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche.
Conservatives seem drawn to her idea of unfeterred capitalism and tragically miss he egoism.
November 13th, 2009 | 9:11 pm | #7
I wouldn’t say she doesn’t give arguments. I consider it somewhat of an embarrassment to philosophy that the best-selling introductory ethics textbook (Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy) uses Rand and what arguments she does give as the ethical egoist example, and they are actual arguments. Lou Pojman excerpted some of the argumentative segments of some of her books in one of his many anthologies, and I remember being amazed at how bad the arguments were. They really weren’t any better than the ones in Rachels. But they were arguments.
But I have to note that the Rachels book does claim that no philosopher has ever held the view, which implies that Rand wasn’t a philosopher (even if the claim is patently false: Epicurus founded his entire ethics on an egoistic basis, and I think Democritus might have done so also, and it would be hard to argue that they weren’t philosophers).
November 15th, 2009 | 1:19 am | #8
I have often thought that you had to be an undergraduate to like Rand. There it is not only excusable, but in some cases laudatory as a protection against the standard collectivism of the American university, but to like Rand by middle age is a sign of a life misread.
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