Can you expound on this a little? I’m not sure what your quibble with Rand is on this point. The fact that we evolved is not relevant to what we are now. At least not in a moral sense.
I also think that you are agreeing with Rand on the nature of good and evil. She held that the ultimate arbiter of good and evil was the survival of man. Of course, she expanded the concept man to mean more than homonid.
And although I think she did invoke the tableau rasa concept once or twice, she also held that humans were the “rational animal”.
I had just started reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time when Goodkind’s 6th book in that series came out, Faith of the Fallen. I dropped Rand for a couple days to finish Goodkind’s book up. I immediately noticed the glaring similiarities. IMHO, Goodkind did a very good job of bringing Rand’s principles into a fantasy story in that work. The 7th and 8th books have moved on to highlight different aspects in closer detail. The latest seemed targeted at postmodern antirealism to a large extent.
Considering the collectivist slant to almost every popularly expressed opinion these days, from right-wing Christians to left-wing socialists, I like the idea that some fantasy readers will be exposed to a radically different way of looking at things and some might decide to finally assert ownership of their own lives.
BTW, Goodkind’s latest includes a speech by the hero very similiar to the quote near the top of this thread by Rand about race.
Survival of the individual is what Rand (and myself) felt was important, and that individual making rational choices based on the information possessed by it about the objectively existing universe is the way Rand suggest the individual live.
Species survival is irrelevant to any individual. The species doesn’t have hopes, dreams, regrets, ambitions, or desires. Only individual members of the species do that. So the imaginary construct we label “the species” really isn’t the thing whose survival is imporant. It’s the survival of the individuals that matters.
I wasn’t born because my parents possessed some genetic trait that allowed them to survive long enough to spawn me. My dad would have been dead of rheumatic fever at age 4. My mom was born with poor eyesight, and would have been at a disadvantage competing for food. They didn’t give birth to me until dad was age 30, by which time they could easily have been mauled by tigers or died a hundred other ways. But it’s the power of human reason that created ways to further their individual survival, that same power that helped to cancel out their genetic disadvantages, and that same power that allowed them to make a living, support themselves, and be in a position to make a life together.
The principles of evolution, the notion of the survival of the species, these things are useless when we talk about the survival of individuals with the powers of reason and the choice whether or not to use them.
She viewed the military as one of the few proper functions of government, as our front-line defense against foreign (read: collectivistic) invasion. But it wasn’t the knee-jerk “America right or wrong” attitude of so many conservatives. To her, it was simply a matter of protecting our rights as free individuals. She would not support the military in activities that didn’t further that end.
WARNING: SPOILER
Regarding Atlas Shrugged, she wasn’t specifically anti-military at all. She was portraying a society in which collectivism had run rampant, and the military was simply one of the collectivists’ tools, used to violate people’s rights. Her view of justified military action was in one of the final scenes, in which the “good guys” attacked the “bad guys,” and freed John Galt.
Firstly, let me say that my disagreement is best described as a quibble, because I do agree with the vast majority of Rand’s ideas. And I would say that trying to understand what we are, as a species, without understanding where we came from is ignoring a good chunk of data.
The tabula rasa concept has been pretty much debunked by modern evolutionary psychologists. But that’s not my main quibble. Rand often describes members of pre-agrarian societies as brutal savages, implying that their lack of civilization is a moral failure. Are we to assume that all humans were moral failures 10,000 yrs ago?
Additionally, Homo sapiens evolved as an intensely social animal. She claims that social bonds are inherently secondary to our existence, and that personal achievement is primary. That flies in the face of what we know about ourselves, as a species.
I’ll admit that I’ve had to make some assumptions about her lack of consideration of evolutionary and genetic ideas in the development of her philsophy. But that’s because she never says anything about those things. Were she still alive today, and I had the opportunity to discuss only one topic with her, that would be it.
I must have misunderstood/misinterperated what I was reading (I read the book in english when I was younger and didn’t have as much understanding of the language as I do now…lol).
She seemed very anti-military to me, refering to the soldiers as ‘traffic cops’ and making multiple insinuations that they were stupid, brutal, etc. I thought of the ‘good guys’ (Fransisco, Ragnar, Hank, etc) who fought as INDIVIDUALS, fighting for what they thought was right, and interpreted her meaning to be that ORGANIZED military was bad, but individuals fighting for what they think of is right to be good. It never occured to me that she would make a distinction of a ‘good’ military vs a ‘bad’ one, but now that you say it, it makes sense to me in reference to the book. I suppose it WAS a tool of collectivism run rampant, same as the European militaries in the book.
As I said, this was an eye opening thread for me, on this issue at the least. I have to conceed though that I didn’t really follow her much save for having read and enjoyed both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Of the two, the Fountainhead was definitely my favorite…it really struck a cord in me. In fact, now that I’ve been following this thread, I’d say its time to dust off my copy and re-read it (especially now that my english is so good. :)).
Ya gotta remember Rand’s major works were written in a period when the term “socialist intellectual” was practically a redundancy. She was swimming upstream against some very powerful cultural currents (at least in academic and intellectual circles), and I think a lot of her pigheaded intransigence derives from the bitter struggle of her early career. She also saw a lot of the ugliness of the Stalinist regime firsthand–remember, she was essentially a refugee from Russia–and it instilled in her a bitter and richly deserved contempt for those Western intellectuals (and there were a lot of 'em) who sang praises for the Soviet Union.
Even so, I’d say * Atlas Shrugged * is basically a political tract in the guise of a novel. * The Fountainhead * was better; the characters were less two-dimensional and more varied, and the overall story was simply much more believable. At the risk of getting a horse laugh, I’d say * The Fountainhead * is at least as good as, say, * The Grapes of Wrath * or anything by Charles Dickens. * Atlas Shrugged * is almost on a par with the average pulp magazine novel.
By the way, was Rand an illegal immigrant? I seem to recall she originally came to the States on a limited visa to visit relatives and simply didn’t go back when her visa expired. What was her legal status?
Oh, yeah, and I’m gonna add that I find her philosophy extremely and often absurdly simplistic. Which means that she was often no worse than many of her critics …
Ayn Rand took an incredibly obvious philosophy, which hadn’t previously been so explicitly stated, and stated it. For this she deserves some credit. The problem is that her conclusions based on the philosophy of selfishness are horribly simplistic. She is basically responding viscerally to the horrors of communism and everyone has taken her way too seriously.
Clearly anyone with anything more than a short term vision of their own selfish interests would not behave in the way she writes about. There are even selfish arguements for something way short of the laissez faire capitalism she worships. After all she fails to understand that unbridled capitalism (especially minus the estate tax) is a dynamically unstable system in even the most far fetched models.
So all you Ayn lovers out there: Good job taking an interest in what makes our world tick, now grow up and learn its subtleties.
I always thought the Tabula Rasa concept was illogical on its face. That is, it may be blank, but it is still a tablet as opposed to a parchment or cave wall. IOW we may be born with very few completely instinctual behaviors, but the intellectual tools we are born with certainly influence the behaviors we do develop.
Perhaps she would have said that all humans were moral failures 10,000 years ago. I don’t think so, though. She did mention a few times the idea that a failure of information is not a moral failure. That is, if the savages of 10,000 ago did not know any better, how could they have chosen any better. And morality unless I am misunderstanding here completely, is about choices.
I think she would have agreed that man is a social animal. Look again at the chapter in Atlas Shrugged when Miss Tagert first encounters the strikers all together. The difference is that she felt the important social bonds were not ones of family (mere genetics) or community (mere geography). She would have argued that the important social bonds were those based on trade. Not economic trade. But definately an exchange of values.
I recall a description of this sort of exchange in her non fiction writing somewhere. Oh, Well, I guess I’ll be looking that up tonight.
[hijack] If anyone’s going to start on Goodkind’s books, fair warning: it’s the kind of series where 85% of the plot-driving problems could be solved if the characters would just sit down and talk to each other!! I kept wanting to give them all a good smack. Then again, I tend to want to do the same thing to Ayn Rand’s characters… [/end hijack]
Yes, Rand recognized the value of social bonds. She even indicated that they were, at least in certain instances, key to one’s ability to keep striving. But, never in her main protagonists (ie, Roark or Galt). That implies that perfection means the absolute lack of need of social contacts. That simply doesn’t make sense.
Humans are intensely social animals. We evolved over millions of years to live in groups-- in fact an individual human has next to zero chance of survival. So, it would follow that there would be something in our behavioral make-up that would compell us to seek out others. Not as a secondary interest, but as a primary survival behavior strategy. Her philosophy seems to assume that the individual came first, and that social bonds came later.
On a somewhat ligher note, one might also make an evolutionary argument that the “second hander” behavior suite is a valid survival stratgy. Besides being successfully practiced even by some mammal and bird species, there’s no reason not to expect it to arise in the human species as well. After all, if the species produces individuals who routinely create a surplus of resources, natural selection would also be expected to create individuals whose strategy is to exploit that surplus.