"Atlas Hugged"

The headline writer for this Newsweek piece needs to be taken outside and shot. Not because the piece or title is derogatory toward Ayn Rand, but because the author of the piece is Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina. As you will recall Gov. Sanford admitted to an affair with a South American woman earlier this year. It's not a bad review. Sanford, being a Christian, politely disagrees with Rand on original sin and faith. 

The Fountainhead   is a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society. Howard Roark is an architect who cares nothing about the world's approval; his only concerns are his integrity and the perfection of his designs. What strikes me as still relevant is its central insight—that it isn't "collective action" that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it's the initiative and creativity of the individual. The novel's "second-handers," as Rand called them—the opportunistic Peter Keating, who appropriates Roark's architectural talent for his own purposes, and Ellsworth Toohey, the journalist who doesn't know what to write until he knows what people want to hear—symbolize a mindset that's sadly familiar today.

Actually, I think Sanford is confusing Ellsworth Toohey and Peter Keating. Toohey, a character in part based on the socialist intellectual Harold Laski (one time professor to Pierre Trudeau), is more of a mastermind. He knows exactly what to write to further his collectivist ideals. Peter Keating is the architect who is obsessed with the opinions of others. Sanford does pick up on some key ideas:

Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society." Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another's achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.

How one squares "one man has no right to another's achievement" with the Sermon on the Mount, I'll leave to the governor to explain. My guess is he can't. I've met many Christians over the years who greatly admired Rand, some in similar tones to Gov. Sanford. Two things, however, keep blocking them from "coming over." One is altruism, which is so deeply ingrained, as well as conflated with simple benevolence and compassion, that it is extremely difficult for them to "shake." The other element is original sin. Sanford explains:

There is one more major flaw in Rand's thinking. She believed that man is perfectible—a view she shared with the Soviet collectivists she hated. The geniuses and industrial titans who retire to Galt's hidden valley create a perfect society based on reason and pure individualism; and Galt himself, in the 57-page speech near the book's end, explicitly denies the existence of original sin. The idea that man is perfectible has been disproved by 10,000 years of history. 

This is a bit of a tangled mess. Not really Sanford's fault, he's a politician (an unusually good one too) not an intellectual. Perfectibility is a package deal, to use one of Rand's terms. The common version has it that no one is perfect, we are all weak and flawed beings prone to error or sin. This has it about half right. No one is perfect, or could be in the platonic sense the word is usually employed. To be perfect in that way would require man to be omniscient, something which is not of man's nature. To say that man cannot achieve what is, by nature, barred from him is an absurdity, or a redundancy. 

Rand never argued that man was "perfectible" simply that man was capable of improvement and development. Something which 10,000 years of human history does clearly demonstrate. Indeed, the last three centuries have seen a greater improvement in the moral and material well being of mankind than the previous 10,000, precisely because reason has had a greater hold on the critical mass of the population than in previous centuries. This has been somewhat obscured by the gradual abandonment of reason by the philosophers and intellectuals. 

The contrarian view here is that the last three centuries have been the bloodiest in human history, and in terms of raw numbers that is correct. Violence is, indeed, pervasive in human history, a fact that compelled Edward Gibbon to gloomily observe: "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." At a superficial level this seems to justify man's tendency toward evil or sin. This is an implicitly a collectivist analysis. It is not man that is evil, but certain men. One of the central traits of human nature is free will. How men choose to exercise that free will demonstrates capacity, but not necessity. Not all men, or even most or even more than a tiny minority, are as Hitler and Stalin. Because some choose badly does not entail that man is inherently wicked. John Galt observes in Atlas Shrugged, that original sin is like a playing a game with loaded dice. If you're evil by nature, why try to be good?

Sanford concludes by describing Rand's alleged totalitarian behaviour toward her admirers and students. Allow me to let the Governor, and you gentle reader, in on a little secret from someone who has been hanging around objectivists for more years than he cares to remember. There are as many versions of Ayn Rand's personal life as there are people who met her. This is partly because few knew her very well, and many have as a consequence filled in the gaps through gossip heard from others. Rand was a polarizing figure, as Sanford mentions at the beginning of his piece. Many people took an instant dislike or passionate attachment to her. The result is that many of the accounts of her life fall, rather neatly, into two categories: smears and hagiographies. Either she is greatest being to walk on this earth since Aristotle, or some Svengali who lured young men to their graves. 

My own personal assessment, made at a distance, is that because of Rand's idealism (in the generic rather than philosophical sense) she attracted many very young and very bright people. Because of their intelligence and enthusiasm for her ideas, Rand understood too late, what would have been obvious to anyone who has been around people in their late teens and earlier twenties: they desperately want approval and are extremely impressionable. The fact that they say they are staunch individualists does not change this, very few are mature enough to intelligently challenge someone they admire, especially if they are much older. 

What to fully formed adults might have been opinions, suggestions or off hand comments, became holy writ to many of the members of the "Collective" the nickname for Rand's circle of students and admirers. To give a more recent example. Leonard Peikoff, the man widely regarded as Rand's intellectual heir, often relates the story of meeting an "objectivist" who proudly told him he was changing his hair colour to orange. This is the colour of Howard Roark's hair in The Fountainhead. I suspect many members of the  "Collective" had a similarly superficial grasp of Rand's late night bull sessions. They simply nodded along and said, "Yes, Ayn." Once it was discovered their beliefs did not, pardon the pun, go down to the root, disappointment, anger and retribution inevitably followed.