I’m certainly not sure that Plato didn’t think the Republic was a monstrosity, but More in Utopia certainly was pulling our leg. Plato had a lot of contempt for democracy, blaming Athens for the death of his mentor Socrates. I’m kind of with Churchill on democracy is the worst form of government ever invented, except for all the others. Thus I am a democrat. I think we also have to remember that Socrates was the teacher of Alcibiades and a number of other really annoying young aristocrats, and was closely affiliated with some of the awful committee of 30. The way the jury of 500 worked, each side proposed a punishment after guilt was determined, and the prosecution demanded death, thinking that Socrates would propose exile. Instead, he demanded a pension at public expense for the rest of his life, knowing that the jury would be angry at his contempt.
I think that the cave goes beyond just the limitation of the senses. I think it tries to reach to reason as the ultimate reality, the senses giving us only portions of the shadows from which to work reason. But it is an analogy, and rather weak. Kant goes full bore into the tedium of this work in the Critique of Pure Reason, but the work is too impenetrable for me. My best understanding of it is that Kant runs down all the avenues and concludes that reason isn’t enough to encompass reality, but God can get you there.
No one has mentioned We the Living yet. I liked that one quite a bit, too. If you completely ignore the philosophy (which isn’t so preachy here), it’s an interested look into life in the early USSR.
You make a fair point - I wonder if she would not have herself found contemptible many of those who today claim to follow some sort of Gospel of Atlas Shrugged, only that it’s an a-la-carte pick-and-choose version meant only to justify their own positions.
(Not that she herself was above picking and choosing what conduct she’d engage in. But of course, that was just a sign of her superior rational morality :rolleyes: or, perhaps, just maybe, that she was an imperfect and flawed human rather than one of her heroes)
And in any case may I still have stylistic contempt for the ponderous prose and the smack-you-in-the-face-with-the-message-til-you’re-numb repetition?
I do not pretend to be an expert on Rand, and in fact learned a lot from the thread panache made. But I fail to find what she is saying here to be positive or to even make sense.
By the plain meaning of the words, what is in my rational self interest is what I, as a rational being, believe will be for my own benefit. And she has stated that she believes a system based on my rational self-interest is good. So she is in fact saying that anything I think is good for me is good.
Because she leaves out altruism, she leaves out what allows people to determine which rational self-interests are ethical and which are not. If something is beneficial for me just as long as I am alive, but would destroy the country soon after I die, I cannot see why it would not be in my rational self-interest, even though we all know that this would be wrong.
Rand seem to believe that rational self interest can take the place of altruistic morality and still guarantee that people are still treated fairly. I do not see this is a possibility. Altruism is a needed counterbalance to self-interest.
The fact that her philosophy looks like it might be good but has such a flaw is why I think it is deserving of what is heaped on it. Ayn Rand herself just seems to be someone with a faulty philosophy, and hardly the first.
In We the living, one of the main characters(the one who supports the communists) reminds me of the horse in Animal Farm. Dedicate yourself completely to the collective, until there is nothing left. I wonder if I’m misremembering though. It was a long time ago that I read the book.
No, this is exactly what she is not saying. She believes(wrongly) that rationality and ‘existence’ lead to an objective code of ethics, the one that she is laying out. You have to have thought through all the implications, as she believed she did, and if you did, you would arrive at the same conclusions and the same code as her, and everything would be all right. This devaluation of the subjective is where she commits her greatest error. But she at no point implies that ‘anything I think is good for me is good’, even though her critics often allege this.
There are many reasons this could be against your rational self interest. You could care about what happens to your children, your country, your legacy, any number of things. Rational self interest does not mean you are a hedonist. It means you care about the things that you care about. Under Rand’s definition, altruism is the sacrifice of things that you care about for things that you do not care about. For example, your child’s life for another child’s life.
The counterbalance that she builds in is that everybody is rationally self interested, and initiating violence is a big no-no. Everyone counterbalances everyone else. Altruism, especially as Rand defines it, is superfluous.
I disagree that a philosophy that is essentially aimed at human happiness, rooted in non violence and mutual agreement of value, even if flawed in its conception, becomes ‘deserving of what is heaped on it’.
In her works at least(I have never heard her interviews or read anything of her pronouncements outside of her books), I do not see what you call contempt for a very large majority of people. Her contempt in the books is reserved for her villains. Her contempt of altruism, is her contempt of a definition of altruism which I doubt you would share, and which I do not think indicates contempt for anyone who helps others or is interested in doing so.
The Golden Rule is a very good first approximation to a moral system. It works best when you recognize that other people have interests also. Civilization is possible because we all surrender a small portion of our personal direct interest, in order to create a society where we can all reap the much greater benefits of living together.
Rand overlooks this quid-pro-quo. She argues that “the individual” is the only person who matters…completely missing the point that there are many, many individuals.
She took this to such an absurd degree as to celebrate the composer of a piece of orchestral music…while holding the orchestra in contempt!
Rand’s “individualism” was almost autistic in its degree of neglect for the viewpoints of other persons. Her philosophy makes no accommodation whatever for other viewpoints. Any compromise was utterly intolerable to her. Compromise in the interest of mutual co-existence was “anti-life.” She believed in a very harsh “zero-sum” system, in which (for example) anti-smoking laws were an immoral infringement on individual liberty (hers!) without any concern whatever given to the rights of others not to have to breathe someone else’s smoke.
But Rand does recognise this. Her credo requires everyone to explicitly acknowledge that others have the same right they do, and their self interest gives them no claim over other people. You may say this does not go far enough, but to say that she doesn’t recognise the rights of others is simply incorrect.
Sorry, just something she wrote once; probably in the AR Reader. You can find it in AS, where the celebrates the musical composer, but sneers at “folk music” because it’s (you know) common.
I’d love to re-read every word that she wrote just to give you a cite for a really minor point, but, well, not gonna.
Then you shouldn’t claim she did it, especially when you’re wrong about some statements of her major beliefs, as I pointed out in the post just above the one you’re responding to.
Sorry if I’m wrong. It’s something I remember having read. This isn’t a scholarly thread, but an opinion column. I agree my memory is just as bad as the next guy’s – maybe worse. If I’m wrong, it’s hardly the first time.
That said, Ayn Rand did bash folk music, considering it low and repetitive and muddy. That’s not only in AS, but in one of her essays on art. She prized “individual” composition, and denigrated “collective” composition.
Her praise of individuality was essentially autistic, denying “other” minds’ contributions, and especially denying collaborative creativity.
Rational or enlightened self-interest is based on a community of goals. Rand only emphasized solitary creativity. Only John Galt ever created his electrical engine; only Hank Rearden created Readen metal; etc.
The whole Richard Halley/Mort Liddy subplot indicates her disdain for any music other than that written by individuals for individuals.
This is Rand’s biggest problem: she over-elaborates her points. She improved after The Fountainhead. She discarded the over-the-top caricature of Ellsworth Toohey. But she still failed to provide any meaningful balance in her views and opinions, and suffered badly from an exaggerated sense of ethics.
I am thankful to you, bldysabba, for correcting me on some of my errors. (What does your login name refer to? I’m deeply curious! “Trinopus” is a character in a book.) I readily acknowledge I’m not a top-level scholar. I’m not even a middle-level scholar!
I take some comfort from your not having corrected or contradicted me on some others of my points: the extremism of the “anti-life principle” and Ellsworth Toohey’s 2 dimensionality prominent among them. Rand really did write in a contemptuous fashion, and this is one of the reasons I think it is (in part) valid to hold such writing in very low regard.
(All that…but I still enjoyed AS and TF; good solid page-turning drama.)
(And…no…I don’t cite the famous “rape scene” in any of my arguments because, frankly, I don’t know what the hell to make of it. I was shocked by it, and considered it an example of really, really bad behavior on the part of both Roark and Francon. She served him up a shit pie…and he ate it…and made her eat it right there with him. Turned me off on both characters. People that stupid are not worthwhile protagonists in a novel!)
It was her belief that the individual ego is the wellspring or the ‘fountainhead’ of creativity, sure, and her interest in depicting the heroic man meant her heroes were unrealistic savants. But I view that as a creative choice. Almost every single story since the beginning of time is about heroes that are more than normal men. Why single out her books for extra hatred because she has heroic characters?
I’m not sure I remember this, but I freely admit that her ideas about appreciation of aesthetics are bound to be bad, considering her devaluation of subjective experience.
I agree that she isn’t very good at depicting complexity, mostly because I don’t think she tries. Have you read We The Living? That has a few characters that are tough to slot into good/bad. As for Toohey - I never found him very interesting, so I don’t remember much about him, but you are quite possibly right, and he is a very “cartoon villain” kind of character. That would not cause me to have contempt for an author or her books though.
Not sure if sarcasm. My username is reference to a Black Sabbath song.
I did try and point out why I disagree with your perceived extremity of ‘anti-life’ though. Rand’s definition of altruism is very specific. She defines it as the sacrifice(or the demand that you sacrifice) that which you hold dear for that which you do not value. I don’t think most people and most conceptions of altruism fit into that definition, so I don’t think her writing displays contempt for most mankind. This is at least to some degree a matter of perception. YMMV.
I agree. I thought Atlas Shrugged was a page turner. I genuinely didn’t realise what was going on and how this mysterious ‘destroyer’ was taking the world apart.
Her ideas about sex were weird. But the scene never struck me as rape. I thought consent was implied in the way she wrote the scene and the bits that preceded it.
Because she based the whole philosophy of her books on these principles, to the degree (in TF) of creating a grotesque straw-man caricature of those she imagined opposed her. And because, in AS, she decreed that those who have different views are “anti-life.”
I love books with heroic characters! Lord of the Rings, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc. I even like the heroic characters in AS; Dagny Taggert and Hank Rearden: they’re great characters.
I’m singling out AS for disdain for more or less the same reason I have less-than-full respect for C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Both books are preachy. But AS, worse, is mean-spirited, and at least Lewis avoids that.
No, not sarcasm. I’m completely ignorant as to Black Sabbath music – I’m more of a Vivaldi man – and so I honestly had no idea what your login name referred to. It just struck me as a good time to ask!
I might agree with you…except for her parable of the factory and the charity program – the one that ends with a little girl getting her face punched in because she’d accepted charity dental surgery. Here, Rand takes on, not altruism as you say she defines it, but altruism in a much more commonplace sense: an ordinary workplace welfare program. A little money is set aside from everyone’s wages, and used for medical needs for the poorest workers.
Most of us participate in something like this. Most of us do donate a little to charity, both through the big payroll deduction programs – Red Cross, American Cancer Society – but also to company-wide charities, such as a “sick day transfer program” where I can donate my unused sick days to a co-worker who might need it more than I do.
Rand castigated this idea, portrayed it as a horrific failure, so evil that it caused physical violence and so corrupt that it caused the entire company to collapse. This is so very obviously absurd, it can only be ridiculed as painfully ignorant.
This is why I find parts of AS “contemptible.” Rand misrepresents the truth, and draws big universal lessons from her own fantasy depictions of how the world works.
On another topic entirely, why is her book set in a fantasy world? Where are the President and Congress? Where is the military? Where is the Red Cross or the Catholic Church? Why does her fantasy economy collapse, when, even in the worst throes of the Great Depression, ours didn’t? To me, this makes it feel as if her ideas can only work in a fantasy world of her own invention, and that they have no relevance to the real world.
(And why, for heaven’s sake, was a silly sonic cannon the big scary high-tech evil in the book, and not the A-Bomb?)
In the same vein, why doesn’t the second tier of middle management just take over and run things? There are millions of people capable of keeping a company or a department running, maybe not brilliantly, but well enough. Seriously, if the world’s top fifty geniuses had heart attacks right now, I don’t think the world economy would even recognize the event.
I knew too much about the book, from lots of discussions of this sort, so I knew who John Galt was, etc. So I lost the effect of reading it for discovery. Sort of as if I had “re-read” it for my first reading.
Kind of. That’s what’s so weird. There’s a very shadowy kind of “hinted” consent. And, of course, it was written in an era when rape wasn’t seen the way it is today. For instance, in the 1950s, a husband could pretty much rape his wife without any legal complications, and the law also was not sympathetic to the idea that a prostitute could be raped. We’ve come a long way since then.
I disagree. She characterised a very specific set of views as anti-life, not just those with different views.
Can you give me examples of mean-spiritedness? I’m beginning to think, based on your views, that your memory and thoughts of the book are coloured by more than the content. Because…
…your memory of the ‘charity’ program instituted in the factory is quite wrong. Here’s a description of the program instituted in the factory, from the source material.
Do you believe you’ve participated in something of the sort? Or that this is a description of an everyday program that many of us experience? It is not. But it IS a description of a socialist/communist system taken to an extreme. And that does end in disaster, and has done in many places across the world. Not least the Soviet Union, China, and India, each of whom had to make big changes to their economic systems to recover from the massive damage dealt to them by Socialism/communism. Literally billions of people have suffered extremely poor quality of life for decades because of the kind of systems Rand is opposing.
I’ve shown that you’re mistaken about what you think Rand is representing. Beyond that Rand is using a fictional setting to elaborate her ideas because it helps her tell her story and to make her point. She could have set her book in the USSR for verisimilitude, but that would presumably not have connected with her intended audience as well. But quibbling about her setting is neither here nor there.
And again, you do not seem to remember the book very well. The ‘leaders’ are actually among the last to quit. Throughout the book she lists instances of their companies losing ‘people of ability’ - everyone who works hard and does a good job - because they’re not satisfied with how society, their jobs, their bosses etc treat them. She does not posit that it’s because 50 people have quit that the world has stopped. Her story is about a few characters, but that’s because it’s a story. As I said before, the kind of misaligned incentives Rand describes in her book have been tried in the world, and have failed drastically, in much the same way that she lays out. If people are not incentivised, they will not work. It happens.
While I do confess it’s been a while since I’ve read it, I do not believe your disputations here are valid. You’re focusing on minutiae, and claiming my view is ignorant on that basis.
For instance, it is the very exaggeration you note of the charity program in the factory that makes the story silly. She takes a valid idea – charitable giving at the workplace – and turns it into an insane parody. She portrays both labor and management as so stupid that they cannot turn away from a program that leads to total destruction. She takes a valid concept – a small percentage of donations to charity – to a level that even Stalin and Lenin didn’t practice, and then bases her triumphant declaration of philosophical demonstration on this insanity.
She condemns the legitimate, rational, small-scale charity program that we engage in in the real workplace today on the basis of her exaggerated parody. She uses it to cast doubt on such things as our Social Security system.
I certainly don’t remember the “Strike” as being the way you describe. The story is quite clear: when the high-level creators walk out, the whole system fails. And I don’t believe this is reasonable in the real world.
(I also note the hypocrisy of the guy blowing up his oil wells and Rand then claiming it was his withdrawal of the guy’s creative genius that caused the oil company to fail!)
I pointed out that she had to create a fantasy world for her ideas to make sense, and this, ultimately, is the reason the book fails. Her ideas simply don’t work in reality.
A much better story, one where the workings of society fail because of its loss of its basic connection with nature, is “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster. Or, if you will, take “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Allegorical dystopian fiction can be thoughtful and elegant. Even the horrors of “1984” are more sophisticated than what Rand produced.
I think this is the real reason for what the OP asks. Orwell is taught in schools today, and Rand isn’t, because Orwell was able to produce a fairy tale that doesn’t pretend to be a philosophical treatise. He was engaging in allegory openly and honestly. Rand was pretending to analyze real world economic issues.
Now…if you tell me that, no, Rand was writing a fairy tale, no more to be taken seriously than “1984” or “Farnham’s Freehold” or even The Chronicles of Narnia – if you tell me that Rand intended her story to be a fable – I’ll be open to the idea. It’s really just about the only possible salvation the book could have for me.
You’re welcome to think that she’s describing an insane and unbelievable parody if you want. I was born in a system that was influenced and run on socialist principles (pre 1990s India). I know first hand how bad things can and do get in an economic system run on socialist principles, and how difficult it is to change such a state of affairs. (You think the system she’s described in that factory is impossible? At one point, India’s top marginal tax rate was 97%) Where you look at Rand’s dystopia and go “This is unbelievable”, I see reflections of a truth that my country has lived through, and am unable to dismiss her work with contempt.
Atlas is best thought of as Science Fiction-- dystopian Science Fiction. If you’re complaint is that she created a fantasy world, then… all SciFi is bad fiction.
Atlas is not Animal Farm. Neither is Strange in a Strange Land.
Keep in mind that Rand never intended to create fiction that is “realistic”. Her idea of art, and I think there is a lot of validity to that, is that art is “the selective recreation of reality”. If you want realism, watch Big Brother or Survivor. (And I say that as generally a big fan of Survivor. )
judgement.
)