She calls her aesthetics “Romantic Realism”- the presentation of life as it should and can be. She would thus own being called a Romantic but not a Romanticist. Just like I may believe in Divine Creation via Evolution but am technically neither a Creationist nor an Evolutionist.
It’s not that this reductionist picture of the anthill is completely wrong, it’s that it is incomplete without the holistic picture. Figure/ground.
Not you.
Once again, I think there was already an old word for that: Homiletics. And a new one, too: Author Tract. Either is both better and more applicable than “Romantic Realism.”
Admittedly I’ve never read the source material, but the impression that I get from what I know of her philosophy and its adherents was that rather than forming a philosophical system and seeing what conclusions result, it seems more that the conclusions that selfishness was moral and that support for the needy was bad came first and then a philosophy was developed to rationalize those conclusions. In this way its like creationists pointing at the grand canyon as evidence of the great flood.
You’re not an idiot.
At issue is not whether she was genuinely committed to her convictions. She may well have been. But so was Marx. That doesn’t make it a good/right philosophy. What’s more, it’s easy to show how it falls short of being applicable in the real world.
So while we can academically debate whether these types of utopias can be achieved if only people do as they “should”, the fact is that societies are simply to complex to realistically expect them to conform to a single minded ideal. In that respect alone, Rand’s idea are naive.
Charles Darwin started out as a traditional religious believer, and only very reluctantly, with anxiety, and by stages abandoned the faith, in light of his scientific discoveries whose implications he could not honestly deny to himself.
I mention that only because it is a highly unusual story in intellectual history in any field.
An Objectivist Atlas will shrug
When the ladies won’t go past a hug
Self-reliant as Rand
Is his own nimble hand
On his Fountainhead ready to tug!
Maybe she just had slightly retarded empathy neurons. Time for a new thread.
A thread asking whether “empathy neurons” exist?
If we’re going to engage in some psycho-biographical speculation, it is impossible to overstate the impact the Russian revolution had on Alisa Rosenbaum. She came from a petit bourgeois Jewish family, and lived through the revolution and civil war and triumph of the Bolsheviks as a young adult.
So the notion of collectivists smashing and enslaving a country was something she lived through. A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on hot stove again. But they won’t sit on a cold one either.
The notion that the first real axiom of her ethical system was “helping starving people is bad” and the rest followed from that is simply ridiculous.
Why did she construct an entirely fictional world history? What significant advantage does this have over taking the real world and introducing a significant fictional change in the course of the novel? By separating her world from reality, it distances its moral lessons from relevance.
She probably did know who the President was. But why does her world not even have a President? Why call it “The United States” if it more closely resembles Graustark?
Would you be allowed to go free, perhaps to inform a highly interested U.S. Government about the location of Galt’s Gulch? Do they respect individual freedom that far?
You would appear to be projecting, given that I never said any such thing.
Personally, I think TARP was a very good idea, as it lessened the severity of the recent recession. Tens of thousands of jobs were preserved, which would have been lost. The Federal Reserve Bank provides the same service, by preventing panics, which the gold standard (even if there were enough gold, which there isn’t!) can’t do.
In these regards, Rand is (or would be) a fucking idiot.
I couldn’t. But the vice-president of the bank could. And the CFO of the bank could. And the controller of the bank could. If the top tier executives were raptured, the economy would not collapse.
If he is the sole owner, maybe. Was the oil tycoon the sole owner of his oil wells?
In practice, of course, I favor eminent domain as a means of taking up public ownership of property that is in danger of being destroyed. Your right to set fire to your house is limited, and not solely by fire-hazard rules. When the guy in “Field of Dreams” started ploughing under his corn, there actually are legal mechanisms in place to stop him. (Not least, laws against self-harm.)
I’m willing to admit that this degree of public/private intwinement is debatable.
But if the Oil Guy wasn’t the sole owner of his oil wells, then he committed a crime against the property of other people. And, in the real world, oil tycoons are never the sole owners of their oil wells.
I hold this premise of the novel to be a load of hooey. The real world has many, many, many people who can actually do stuff, and most of them do it pretty well.
Go to any amateur art show. Attend any back-street concert. Read books by people who aren’t professionally published. (The SDMB has several.) Look at the tens of thousands of small businesses that succeed.
Rand’s anti-humanism was, in my opinion, odious. She sold humanity short.
I read Atlas Shrugged years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. At the time, I considered it intellectually stimulating. However, I never seriously considered it a model for an actual society. It was just an interesting tale with philosophical overttones
I agree with other posters who have pointed out that no theoretical system, whether political or economic, survives translation to the real world intact. This includes her theory of Objectvism.
I think she realized this later in life and was trapped in a philosophical straightjacket of her own making. In her old age she was forced to accept Social Security, and maybe Medicare, but was too ashamed to apply for it herself, so she had someone else do it for her.
I also agree that some of her positions are misinterpreted or misunderstood by many people. But her admiration for rugged individualism goes a step too far for me when she expresses admiration/fascination for a gruesome serial killer named William Edward Hickman, which was discussed on this very board. Here’s one of her comments about him:
But, dataguy, can one consider her a hypocrite on the Social Security issue? She was collecting on a system that she was forced to pay into.
Well, she had a lot to say about philosophy, ethics, politics, and art, but I never heard of her even pretending to understand economics.
But Rand did.
Why did George Orwell or Aldous Huxley?
They respected it above all else. They let Dagny Taggart leave.
And that’s great and all. And there is a place for art. But the world can run without artists. It can’t run without people who know how to build railroads and mines and electrical plants and steel mills and whatnot.
Like most fiction, it’s an idealized world, not a roadmap for society. People in Atlas Shrugged are either Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Thomas Edison all rolled into one. Or they are Lumberg from Office Space. The problem with all absolutist ideologies, whether it’s laissez faire capitalism, communism, objectivism or whatever, is that they don’t account for the various exceptions for who the system doesn’t work (other than perhaps killing them or allowing them to go fuck themselves).
Not the same. Their dystopian novels were not alternate-history, they were set in the future relative to the time-of-writing and assumed a world that had grown out of the real world as it existed at the time-of-writing. AS apparently assumes an alternate history, with what AH fans call the point-of-divergence at some time before Rand wrote it, but the POD is never specified or hinted at, AFAIK.
Try telling that to Howard Roark! :mad:
See post #76.