Eminentoes/ Ayn Rand, R.I.P
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
EMINENTOES AYN RAND, R.I.P. She was, to borrow a phrase from Disraeli, a self-made woman who ? worshipped her creator. And now, at 77, Ayn Rand, the Goddess of Libertarian Objectivism, has...
...The balance has been tenuous, the tension at times has tightened till it was spiritually almost unbearable...
...Given their lack of artistic merit, what was it about Ayn Rand's writings--particularly her novels-that held so much attraction for such a large, middle-brow audience...
...They're both really decent sorts, but I remember almost gagging when one of them delivered the glib pronouncement that having children "was out of the question" for philosophical reasons...
...Such were the hardcore Randians of latter days, when the high priestess of individualism transformed herself into the grand inquisitor of objectivist orthodoxy, prescribing what her followers should and should not read, sing, dance, smoke, think, and feel...
...Part of the answer may be her strong sense of the market...
...Personally, I'm all for money...
...What's the basis for placing consciousness in the human brain...
...At least you got things half right...
...Why, that phrase sums up all the problems of the Library of Congress...
...Ayn Rand was also clearly in the right when she argued that money is not the source of all evil...
...Berry had drawn first blood...
...She certainly cannot be accused of having wasted her time in this vale of tears...
...She couldn't stand Shakespeare and resented Balzac, who combined a belief in God with a brilliant naturalism...
...They even used the same abusive jargon, describing d i s s e n t e r s as "hooligans...
...Most humor is " a camouflage of moral cowardice," she declared in The Romantic Manifesto...
...The conference opened with a lecture by George Wald, who, when he first stepped into the Wilson Room, was confused...
...That, 1 suppose, is why I am a conservative fusionist rather than a pure traditionalist or a pure libertarian...
...After all, this is the Library of Congress...
...The eels survived because they acted by instinct, "but human beings lack the safeguards for instinctual life, and can only rely on good and evil...
...Science and literature...
...pitching selfishness to middle-class adolescents and young AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading...
...One might "laugh with a hero, but never at him . . . " - - a grim sentence that gives an inkling of what it must have been like to sit through her drearily earnest Manhattan salon sessions if one happened to be cursed with a sense of humor...
...I am thinking of one rather celebrated Randian couple now in their forties who rose very high in academia and government and never lost their awe for Objectivism...
...And only the uneasiest of objectivists is likely to fear and resent spirituality with the intensity of an Ayn Rand...
...While rightly disdaining the vulgarity and depravity of much modern art, Ayn Rand fell a ready victim to the gaseous romantic sentimentality of the late nineteenthcentury Middle European milieu she was raised in...
...I follow the lead of the late Frank Meyer, a beloved and much-missed mentor who warned that: Without the implicit acceptance of an absolute ground of value, the pre-eminence of the person as criterion of political and social thought and action has no philosophical foundation...
...For Wald, the h i g h e s t truth of science was "the child-like character of determining everything interesti n g . " The virtue of science was simplicity, and "Einstein's equation, E = mc 2, was classic simplicity and simple arithmetic--even a child can understand it...
...to the extent that Miss Rand's shrill denunciations awakened otherwise naive members of the 50s and 60s generations to this truth, it was all to the good...
...Wald explained that science could only pick out p a t t e r n s of discrete facts...
...Ridicule is most feared by the ridiculous...
...Why not a smokestack and a tractor--or would that be too embarrassingly close to that other soulless, materialist emblem, the hammer and sickle...
...On the other hand, the belief in virtue asthe end of men's being implicitly recognizes the necessity of freedom to choose that end...
...The other odd parallel that struck me during the sixties was the similarity between Randian Objectivism and Marxist Leninism when it came to dealing with dissent...
...Like the pasty-faced characters one so often notices hovering around health food stores, the lastgasp Randians often struck me as hypochondriacs who blamed the Anton B . See & Associates Generic Consultants NATIONAL CENTER FOR INNOVATION IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 3870 C r e ns haw B I v d . #104705 Los Angeles Ca 90008 To Seek And To T e l l The Truth by Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...NOVELS by J. lnchardi $11 each Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Order by mail from Sirius Books, P.O...
...Well, if chance governs everything, what is the role of r e s p o n s i b i l i t y ? " Many delegates sighed, in shock...
...Both movements, starting from opposite extremes, achieved a state of rigid orthodoxy and intolerance of debate...
...It's never been hard to sell people something they want to buy...
...Well,' he said, '! know one thing--consciousness is not in the cerebral cortex.'" Wendell B e r r y , p r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f Kentucky, was aghast...
...He said, 'We're still looking.' I asked him the same question several months later...
...One could not even know what consciousness was, or where it was located...
...her egoist/heroes consistently tall, jut-jawed, and steely-eyed...
...Like Queen Victoria, Ayn Rand was seldom amused, and never at her own expense...
...In my own experience, I have always found that the more acLmirable the person--the braver, brighter, or stronger--the less likely he is to be afraid of honest laughter...
...What a curious mixture of passion and frigidity, faddism and penetration, roiled round that leathery old brain of hers, beguiling legions of susceptible young people over the last quarter century...
...Even with these two true believers, though, altruism ultimately prevailed...
...and freedom would be only a meaningless excitation and could never become the serious goal of serious politics...
...They flocked to her by the thousands--sometimes permanently, more often only until mature experience gave them a fuller understanding of themselves and a deeper comprehension of human history and behavior...
...Her altruist / villains are uniformly slouchy, flabby, and wimpish...
...Indtana by Martin Morse Wooster die...
...This fear and hatred of being found funny, not to say silly, is a symptom of what was worst, and most tyrannical, in Miss Rand's approach to life...
...HIGH MINDS t*..~cience~ and literature," muttered Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin...
...1 t h i n k t h e problem is a . J u d e o - Christian one, the fallacy of believing 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982...
...Yet she loved that arch-poseur, Victor Hugo, and the gracefully second-string Edmund Rostand--no matter that their two most memo(able heroes, Jean Valjean and Cyrano, were both hopeless, "life-denying" altruists who sacrificed their own happiness, security, and physical welfare for others in direct violation of the Randian code...
...Her works--like THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 25 was seldom original (although she claimed, with customary modesty, that the only person other than herself to help shape her ideas was Aristotle...
...10001 adults who feel they've been victimized by the outrageous demands of the Internal Revenue Service, the Ten Commandments, the loca.l draft board, or their family circle is always a p r e t t y good bet and, if you can convince your customers that selfishness is also the key t o restoring bruised egos and recovering frayed s e l f - e s t e e m , you really have them hooked...
...So the old trout was crankish and limited in her views and tastes...
...But if they know history and human nature, they also know that no society worth living in has ever managed to survive without more rules and more ~piritual values--usually a moral code rooted in religion of ~iome kind--than Ayn Rand t o l e r a t e d in her tight little theoretical world...
...He is current/}, serving as Director of Presidential Speechwriting for Ronald Reagan...
...Wald illustrated this point with a parable about the Danish physicist Niels Bohr...
...In her better moments, Ayn Rand stood for freedom of the soul, even though she limited her definition of the soul in a way that debased it for many individualists who did not share her militant atheism...
...Liberal-collectivist altruism (as opposed to individual humanitarianism and the voluntary charity that has been a part of every civilized community since the dawv) of history) has indeed been a fraud and a disaster...
...Boorstin was addressing the Conference on Science and Laterature, composed of forty scientists, profes sors of literature, and professional writers, all rented for two days at a cost of I18,500...
...Bohr was interested in eel migration, when millions of eels would annually migrate to the Sargasso Sea, shed their eggs, and III F] Sarkes Tarztan Inc Bloomington...
...Her problem, again, was one of excess...
...otherwise virtue could be no more than a conditioned tropism . . . . _9 . . both extremes [rigid traditionalism and pure libertarianism I are self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it...
...where she was original, she was seldom right...
...The/'e were times, in the salad days of the Branden Institute, when it was hard to tell the Objectivists from the Scientologists--one group paying to pass its way up to '"clear" status, the other buying and studying its way into the Senior Collective, their gurus telling both groups that anyone who raised the least doubt about the true path was life-denying or suppressive...
...And why settle for the symbol of the dollar...
...subsidy book i)ublisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly anti juvenile works, etc...
...De Sade rantcd on and on about the virtue of vice...
...Miss Rand about the virtue of sclfishness...
...All Eastern religions realize that good and evil are the two sides of reality...
...It doesn't even deserve to be called altruism since it is based on envy and greed--one might even argue that it is a form of short-sighted selfishness...
...They keep cats, and disagreeable ones at that, in a pampered state most children would envy...
...Dale Carnegie courses, jogging, and the Mormon religion--may strike outsiders as irrational or absurd, but they give'to their devotees a sense of purpose, direction, and fulfillment...
...At the c e n t e r of one wall is a weathered portrait of Wilson by Stanley Middleton, and delegates would occasionalt), ignore the proceedings and stare at the painting, as if to make sure that Wilson was still casting his smiling eyes on them...
...Miss R a f t ' s major heroine, Dagny Taggert ~. Atlas Shrugged, is an unlikely cr~Ss between Tallulah Bankhead and I-lenry Ford...
...After a while, only the most" fragile of adult egos finds a hermetic system of pure, "enlightened" selfishness necessary as a defe.nse against the rest of the world...
...but out of this balance and tension the glory of the West has been created...
...I just don't see how morality applies to greenbacks one way or the other...
...Not since the Marquis d e Sade put the finishing touches to Justine and Ju/iette has a novelist used the fictive form for as much marathon sermonizing as Ayn Rand...
...Does it make sense, my being here...
...Why did the eels do t h i s ? ' Bohr told me...
...New authors welcomed...
...And now, at 77, Ayn Rand, the Goddess of Libertarian Objectivism, has snuffed it...
...To which I will only add, " h e a r , hear.7 Oh yes, and Ayn, old girl, if, despite your adamant assertions to the contrary, your soul is still out there somewhere, congratulations for doing it your way...
...Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology (emeritus) at Harvard University and a Nobel laureate in physiology, recovered his composure and stepped briskly to the microphone...
...preserves for posterity such books as The Pomp o f Power and the World Almanac for 1921 and 1922...
...In her way she was a Good Samaritan...
...It is just because they do not know where they are going that they do it p e r f e c t l y . ' T h a t , " Wald said, " t o me, is the profoundest wisdom...
...24 TFI[- AMEP, ICA~I SPECTATOR MAY 1982 When, after 1,084 seemingly endless pages, the weary pilgrim finally reaches the conclusion of Atlas Shrugged, and John Gait "raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of a dollar," one feels terribly short-changed...
...Objectivism in particular probably helped to target a lot of aimless people--especially the young-toward goals of personal achievement through effort and self-discipline they might not have managed unassisted...
...it was assuming too much of the scientist to ask him to determine orders or plans behind those facts...
...She tried to convert this devil of the altruists into a god for the objectivists...
...The politics of envy has wrought a harvest of decay and regression in many once-free economies...
...To claim exclusive sovereignty for either component--reason or tradition --is to smirch the glory and cripple the potentialities of conservatism in its struggle against the Liberal collectivist Leviathan...
...Both of them were long-winded messiahs minus a god, and all the more dogmatic for it...
...Wald was still composed...
...Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032 to excel after turning to our rich but quirky language...
...There's no basis...
...Ayn Rand may not have been much of a writer (most of her characters are one-dimensional and laughably overdrawn...
...That's a hell of a lot better than most of the pop philosophers of this murky era...
...In the end, altruism will out anyway...
...outer world for internal inadequacies of their own making or imagining...
...English was not her native tongue, and Conrad and Nabokov are probably the only Slavic novelists Aram Bakshian, Jr., is a Washingtonbased author and essayist whose writing on history, humor, and the arts appears frequently in Europe and AmeHca...
...To the impotent in search of omnipotence, Ayn Rand held high the torch of hope...
...If her output was more prolix than profound, at least she was a woman of industry, conviction, and character...
...A dollar bill is about as moral or immoral as a spoon-, a c a r , or a latchkey--inanimate objects that can be used to nourish or poison, carry or crush, protect or pillage...
...Is that all there is...
...Where Ayn Rand was right, she There were aesthetic as well as philosophical ambiguities that flawed Miss Rand's view of the world--and by marketing a complete, indivisible world view she opened herself to criticism one might withhold when dealing with a less pontificating author...
...and free individualism uninformed by moral value tots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny . . . . The history of lhe West has been a history of reason operating within tradition...
...VII join the poets," Wald said, shedding his jacket...
...Like Atlas, most healthy individuals firm in their own self-esteem and honestly committed to a set of values can afford to give the occasional shrug to the minor follies of lesser mortals...
...The sad thing about all this is that Ayn Rand was right about many things, if only she'd known when to quit...
...But she was also admirable in her way...
...The conference was held in Woodrow Wilson's personal library, the Wilson Room of the Library of Congress, a room which Martin Morse ~Vooster is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...All conservatives worth their salt believe in the dignity and integrity of the individual, the sanctity of property, and the desirability of keeping state authority to the minimum level practical...
...And then there is the dialogue problem--actually a monologue problem...
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...Linguistics ~ r e n ' t the half of it though...
...I asked one neurophysicist what evidence he had for placing consciousness in the brain...
...This is not so much art, philosophy, or psychology as a burlesque We/tanschauung based on physiognomy...
...her plots, to put it mildly, are implausible), but one should make allowances...
Vol. 15 • May 1982 • No. 5
