I may be the last liberal on earth who has not yet seen the Zombie Ayn Rand video posted last week. It looked very funny, but not my kind of thing. Like most people who lean toward the left, I have a deep-seated revulsion for Ayn Rand. And yet I am not quite ready to jump on the Rand-bashing bandwagon. At least, not to the extent of zombification.
To be frank, I have read almost nothing of Rand’s work. My sampling of her fiction extends no further than a few chapters of Atlas Shrugged, which was on my high school English reading list. It was a long time ago, but as I recall there were some competently written sections in it. And the enthusiasm that Rand felt for her male heroes was infectious.
However, I put the book aside after making very little headway. This wasn’t because my taste in literature was too-refined. I read a ton of pop-fiction as a kid, and I still have a fondness for guys like Mario Puzo, of The Godfather fame, and Trevanian, who wrote smart spy novels like The Eiger Sanction.
The fact is, I found Atlas Shrugged boring. I don’t remember a single moment of sharp, vivid detail in it. Her characters felt more like placeholders, hypothetical figures in a long, thinly-veiled essay. As a writer, I find this sin of Rand’s the most unforgivable—she was a lazy writer.
She committed other sins, too. I detected a strong undercurrent of sadomasochism, even in the little bit of Atlas Shrugged that I consumed. In Rand’s Nietzschean universe, men are required to be brave, strong, and visionary. Women, on the other hand, function mainly as awe-struck witnesses, waiting to be dominated.
Worse still is Rand’s philosophy of human relationships—namely, that selfish egotism is the only authentic and productive mode of interaction that we can have with each other, with nature, and the world itself. It’s just warmed-over Fascism, as far as I can tell. (I haven’t read any of her essays, and I don’t particularly want to).
Of course, to a considerable section of our population, Fascism is fab. Again. It’s not surprising that Rand would have captured the imagination of so many adolescent conservatives in the 1950s and beyond. Alan Greenspan has written candidly about the impact Rand’s work had on him as a young man. Indeed, much of modern Libertarianism can be traced back to Rand’s work, with its shunning of government—especially remote, national, centralized government— as the source of all mediocrity, bureaucracy, and group-thought.
There is a lesson here, I think, about the insidious power of evil art. I don’t mean “evil ” as in “perverted”, or anything like that. I mean “evil” as in encouraging destructive emotions and ideas. As John Gardner wrote, “Nothing in the world has greater power to enslave than does fiction.” He did not just mean books, obviously. Many contemporary films strike me as evil, if unintentionally so. Rand’s stuff is in a different class, however, because she gives a so-called intellectual framework for her point-of-view. We must throw this so-called “philosophy” into the mix as well.
Note that I said “into the mix” and not “on the pile.” We want to keep Rand and Quentin Tarantino and even Leni Riefenstahl, for that matter. Let me state unequivocally that I don’t think any kind of art—even my category of so-called “evil” art—should be banned or anything like that, not even if it were in our power. Even evil art is better than nothing. I simply mean that we, as educated people, should expose the fault in such art and help people resist its undeniable appeal.
One way I do this with Ayn Rand is as follows…
I point out that the hero of her other famous bestseller, The Fountainhead, was modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest architect in American history. Wright was, without a doubt, a rebel and an egomaniac, of the sort Rand was attracted to. He did shun authority and conventional definitions of morality. But that was just the surface of Wright. He was also a deeply spiritual man, with some of his greatest architectural creations being churches and synagogues. And he was wholly devoted to the various women in his life (albeit in serial fashion).
Wright even build government buildings like city halls and municipal structures, many time through his career.
Most importantly, he was a great proponent of cheap, durable housing for the masses, creating a template for what he called the Usonian house. In Wright’s vision, the Usonian house would be both affordable and artistic. Personally, I cannot imagine any of the current batch of Randian politicians advocating the creation of any kind of affordable, middle-income housing, artistic or otherwise.
In short, Rand got Wright wrong. Completely wrong. I think she got just about everything wrong. Still, she got people reading…
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