 |
 |
|
| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Books |
|
|
Review |
Exasperating But Necessary
|
| Ayn Rand was a kind of 20th-Century Jonathan Swift, with a keen eye for the inhumane underbelly of the humanitarian project |
|
Published : 1 November 2010 |
| |
|
|
|
|
| Ayn Rand and the World She Made
|
|
|
|
| A |
YN RAND WAS ONE OF THOSE WRITERS who exert
immense influence in spite of being burdened with
an unenviable critical reputation. The consensus
among literary types is that her novels and essays are utterly
derivative, two-dimensional and dogmatic. This has
not prevented her from becoming a heroine to thousands
of activists on the
|
libertarian wing of conservative politics in the USA and elsewhere. No other apologist for ‘free markets and free minds’ has been loved quite so ardently by the battalion of youthful ideologues who regard capitalism as God’s greatest gift to mankind. The likes of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman are all more highly esteemed by academics, but their work remains the property of the few. Only Rand has won the hearts of the rank and file.
One of the reasons for Rand’s cult status is the epic sweep
of her life, which has now been recreated with great facility
in Anne C Heller’s fascinating biography. Born in St
Petersburg in 1905 to an affluent Jewish family, Rand spent
her early years in a Russia traumatised by the decline of
Czarism and the rise of communism. She seems to have
been ferociously intelligent and unashamedly weird from early childhood onwards. Solitary, bookish and contemptuous
of her mother’s social pretensions, she responded to
the October Revolution with horror but took full advantage
of the Soviet government’s policy of expanding the number
of Jews in higher education. She had already sketched the
outlines of what she would later call her ‘objectivist’ philosophy
by the time she graduated from Petrograd State
University in 1924.
Granted a visa to leave the Soviet Union in 1926, Rand
fled immediately to the USA and remained there until her
death in 1982. Her first three decades in the States were
devoted to a tireless effort to achieve success as a writer
of fiction. While working as a playwright and Hollywood
scriptwriter she set out to dramatise her ideas in a series
of novels, two of which—The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957)—became runaway bestsellers and remain
her most widely read works. The latter in particular illustrates
her enormously melodramatic cast of mind with
great vividness. Set in an America where the smooth workings
of the free market are increasingly undermined by
industrial militancy, it lovingly depicts a co-ordinated attempt
by the ruling elite to rid itself of the working-class
menace. Its simple but arresting premise is that the best
way for the capitalist class to reclaim control of society is to
bend the strike weapon to its own purposes. Led by the improbably
Promethean John Galt, Rand’s heavily idealised
clerisy of industrialists, financiers and scientists simply remove themselves to a mountain retreat and refuse to put
their talents (or their money) at the disposal of the common
herd. The result is that America grinds to a halt as the limits
of ordinary people’s competence rapidly become apparent.
No other book has ever communicated love for the rich and
contempt for the poor as vehemently as this.
| OSCAR WHITE / CORBIS |
 |
American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand espoused
her philosophy of objectivism and ‘rational selfishness’ in her
novels, which included The Fountainhead. |
Rand’s success as a novelist emboldened her into trying
her luck as a leader of men. In the early 1950s she began to
surround herself with a small group of disciples, each of
whom was expected to play a role in popularising her objectivist
philosophy. Among the most able of her early acolytes
was the young Alan Greenspan, whose obdurate devotion to
free-market principles came close to sinking the American
economy when he served as Chairman of the Federal
Reserve between 1987 and 2006. Inspired by the thought
that she was doing more than anyone else to inoculate the
public mind against socialism, Rand wrote voluminous
amounts of non-fiction in her later years and eventually
became the high priest of a substantial libertarian subculture.
More than one writer has commented on the tension
between her ostensible principles and her treatment of her
followers. She was clearly the sort of person who loved the
idea of individual liberty in the abstract but expected iron
discipline from her associates in practice. As the British
philosopher John Gray has recently reminded us, she even
insisted—or at least was rumoured to insist—that her fellow
objectivists use the same sort of cigarette holder as she used
herself. Nor was she averse to inflicting terrible pain on the
people closest to her. In her late 40s she openly embarked on
an extramarital affair with Nathaniel Branden, the author
and polemicist who later founded the Nathaniel Branden
Institute in order to promote objectivist ideas. Rand’s position
was that Branden’s wife and her own husband should
accept the affair without demur. Why should the gifted be
bound by the same standards as everyone else?
Heller’s book contains a lot of new information and more
than holds its own against Barbara Branden’s pathbreaking
biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986). As Heller herself
acknowledges, its most innovative feature is its attempt to
relate the Russian phase of Rand’s life to the later American
phase. Unlike the majority of Rand scholars, Heller argues
that Rand’s mature thought was powerfully influenced by the catastrophe that enveloped upper-class Russian Jewry
in the turbulent years after the abortive revolution of 1905.
There are some especially interesting remarks about the
impact of anti-semitism on the mind of the young Rand. As
the Czarist state struggled desperately to see off the challenge
of the liberal bourgeoisie and the Marxist Left, it was
common for apologists for the existing order to blame the
flowering of revolutionary politics on some sort of Jewish
conspiracy. One of the things that distinguished the new
forms of anti-semitism from the older variety was the tendency
to equate Russian Jews with the miseries of modernity.
Whereas Jews had previously been seen as bestial
exponents of rural barbarism, they were now portrayed
as sinister entrepreneurs intent on ruining Mother Russia
with their taste for democracy, industry and usury. Heller’s
point is that Rand’s work simultaneously preserved and
subverted these anti-Jewish calumnies. Taking the equation
of Jewry with entrepreneurship at face value, Rand
sought to turn it to her people’s advantage by portraying
industrialists and financiers as the luminous benefactors
of a new civilisation. In this sense her books were less a
celebration of the USA than a settling of accounts with the
prejudices of Europe.
Heller’s evocation of Rand’s childhood and adolescence
provides a timely reminder of how much European Jewry
suffered, even before the rise of Nazism. After Rand leaves
Russia the book becomes much less claustrophobic. Its
second half leaves us in no doubt that the truly important
thing about her was her contribution to the emergence of
the New Right. At the time when she produced her most
impassioned defences of the free market—roughly between
1935 and 1970—it was widely believed that laissez-faire
capitalism had disappeared forever. The political classes
took it for granted that a combination of the welfare state,
Keynesian demand management and selective public ownership
had humanised the market system and put an end to
the poverty and inequality of an earlier age. It was this state
of affairs that Rand, Hayek, Robert Nozick and the other
savants of post-war libertarianism set out to overturn.
Their achievement—if that is the right word—was to pave
the way for a renaissance of free-market politics by making
more extravagant claims for capitalism than anyone either before or since. Rand’s encomiums to the power of
the market make Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Vilfredo
Pareto seem faint-hearted by comparison. Her most startling
argument, enunciated in classic essays such as ‘What
Is Capitalism?’ (1965), is that the market is not merely the
most efficient means of allocating goods and services but
also a peerless instrument of self-realisation. Rand clearly regarded
the successful entrepreneur as a sort of Nietzschean
Übermensch, steadily moving towards a peak of creativity
by pursuing a unique moral vision untrammelled by outside
intervention. If arguments such as these now seem insanely
credulous, it is nevertheless the case that Rand and her
co-thinkers could only wean the public from its dirigiste
sympathies by exaggerating the merits of capitalism to an
absurd degree. The age of Reagan, Thatcher and George W
Bush would never have occurred without the rhetorical excesses
of the theorists who inspired it.
Heller makes it clear early in her book that she is “not
an advocate for Rand’s ideas.” This raises the question of
whether someone who is not ideologically sympathetic
to right-wing libertarianism can get anything out of her
writings. The answer is surely yes. Quite apart from its
intrinsic historical interest, Rand’s work retains its relevance
because it forces those of us on the socialist and
Left-liberal wing of politics to confront the weaknesses,
gaps and blind spots in our own ideas. Like Jonathan
Swift before her—though at a much lower level of literary
achievement—Rand has a deeply unnerving capacity
for exposing the inhumane underbelly of the humanitarian
project. There are two places in particular where this
capacity is shown off to maximum effect. The first is in
the superb novella Anthem (1938), which Rand wrote in a
few weeks when work on The Fountainhead had temporarily
stalled. Set in a Stalinist hellhole in which the majority
of men and women have been reduced to the level of
slaves, Anthem tells the story of a disaffected individualist
known only as Equality 7-2521. The book’s case against
socialism is at once childishly simple and irritatingly difficult to refute. The big problem with the idea of equality,
or so Rand implies, is that it is inimical to the human instinct
for friendship. No socialist government can tolerate
intimacy between friends, relatives or lovers, since to do so is to encourage the sense that some people are worth
more than others. Nor can a socialist regime allow any of
its citizens to follow a vocation. Men and women who immerse
themselves in a special interest invariably strike the
Stalinist mind as dangerous subversives, immune to the
lure of community. Rand gets her point across with some
memorable touches of absurdist humour. At one point,
Equality 7-2521 speaks of his love of science and expresses
the hope that the regime’s Council of Vocations will send
him to work in a laboratory. When he appears before the
Council to be told what job he has been allocated, its eldest
member utters only two words before sending him on his
way: “Street Sweeper.”
The other place in which Rand’s attack on the Left really
catches fire is in her writings on ecological politics. Appalled
by the emergence of the so-called ‘New Left’ in the 1960s,
she was one of the first writers to identify the hidden dangers
of what she called its “anti-industrial” agenda. It was
not simply that Rand set herself up as the spiritual ancestor
of today’s climate-change sceptics, rejecting the idea that
industrialism necessarily despoils the environment. Her
broader point was that green politics posed an incalculable
threat to civilised life. Once people begin to scale back their
economic activities in the interests of saving the planet—
once they regard science and technology as enemies rather
than agents of liberation—they risk unleashing a wave of irrationality
that ultimately imperils the very survival of industrial
society. Things start with a well-meaning attempt
to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and end with
human beings living in mud huts. Let me be controversial
for a moment: it seems to me that no member of the green
movement has ever responded to Rand’s arguments convincingly.
It was John Stuart Mill who famously observed that people
cannot know their own minds until they defend their
beliefs against sustained attack. The great virtue of Ayn
Rand is that her writings on progressive politics are so provocative,
so steeped in satire and sarcasm that they force
conscientious Left-wingers to shore up their ideas with
more convincing philosophical ballast. Anne C Heller’s
book is a fine monument to an exasperating but necessary
writer.
| | | |
| |
|
|
|
|
Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
|
|
wezz
9 March 2011
12:16 AM
|
|
review is better than the book!!!
very thoughtfuk
i hope the publisher paid you well....
|
|
|
|
Michael R. Brown
3 November 2010
01:00 AM
|
|
What a marvelously fair-minded review - from the left! Who ever through the left would acknowledge Rand had some valid points?
|
|
|
|
| 1 |
|