By Robert
Tracinski
Wednesday,
January 05, 2022
What does Ayn Rand have to offer to our
era? The Russian-born American author rose to prominence as a novelist and
philosopher in the middle of the 20th century, and attracted a large audience
on the American Right with her sharp critique of communism. The comprehensive
alternative she presented in her philosophy and her fiction championed
individualism against collectivism—the fundamental ideological conflict of her
era. That is why, despite her atheism, she enjoyed significant influence on the
American Right and is still considered indispensable, even by many who had
profound disagreements with her.
The issues of today are not quite the
same, nor are the ideological alignments. Yet people are still seeking out Ayn
Rand’s ideas and trying to understand her influence, if sometimes with less
than edifying results. A recent piece in Quillette attributes her influence and relevance primarily to her pop
culture celebrity and the magnetism of her dark and famously penetrating eyes.
But there is much more to Rand’s enduring relevance, and to understand it, we
have to delve into the substance of her ideas.
* * *
Ayn Rand’s influence was closely tied to
her engagement with the big events of her era. She presented her ideas, to an
extent unusual for a philosopher, embedded in commentary on the political and
cultural news of the day. She offered new thoughts on epistemology and
concept-formation in an article on the Republican National Convention of 1964. Her ideas on the
relationship between reason and emotion were presented in a speech on the contrast between the two big cultural events of 1969:
Woodstock and the Moon landing.
But because she was operating on a deeper
philosophical level, her message transcends the particular context in which she
wrote. In her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, she quoted Victor Hugo: “If a writer wrote merely for his time, I
would have to break my pen and throw it away.”
Her philosophy is particularly relevant to
our current iteration of the culture war. I say the current iteration,
because the roots of our culture war stretch back longer than we may think.
There is little you can say about the ideological conformity of the social
media era that she didn’t expose in The Fountainhead—a dissection
of the ideological conformity of Modernist intellectuals during the Red Decade
of the 1930s.
The theme of The Fountainhead,
Rand later wrote, was “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but
in man's soul.” Collectivism in the soul is embodied in the character of Peter
Keating, the ultimate conformist whose only goal in life is to “read the room,”
signal his virtue, and be what others expect him to be. But this creed is given
its self-conscious voice by the novel’s main villain, Ellsworth Toohey. He is
an essential character for understanding her era, and our own: the totalitarian
intellectual.
In a way, characters like Toohey are an
answer to the Jeffersonian assumption that the spreading light of knowledge and
education would guarantee the triumph of liberty. By the early 20th century,
tyranny was no longer championed by monarchs and their hangers-on; it had
become a creed of the intellectuals. This is a conundrum with which the best
authors of the time grappled. (See, for example, the character of O’Brien
in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
Rand uses Toohey to show how the
psychology of conformity was given voice, justification, and encouragement by
the collectivist philosophy of the era. Toohey helps her capture the
funhouse-mirror quality of this ideological conformity, its essential emptiness
and barrenness. In a moment of confession, here is how he describes the ideal
world of the collectivist:
A world
where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the
thought of the next neighbor who’ll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around
the globe. Since all must agree with all. A world where no man will hold a
desire for himself, but will direct all his efforts to satisfy the desires of
his neighbor who’ll have no desires except to satisfy the desires of the next
neighbor, who’ll have no desires—around the globe, Peter. Since all must serve
all. A world in which man will not work for so innocent an incentive as money,
but for that headless monster—prestige. The approval of his fellows—their good
opinion—the opinion of men who’ll be allowed to hold no opinion. An octopus,
all tentacles and no brain.
That sounds like an ordinary Tuesday in
the hive-mind of Twitter. Toohey even grasps what is known today as “audience
capture”: “I’ll have no purpose save to keep you contented. To lie, to flatter
you, to praise you, to inflate your vanity.” In his collectivist future, the
leader is the biggest follower of all.
This is all in contrast to the novel’s
real purpose, which is to show us the totally independent man, someone with no
collectivism in his soul: her protagonist, the young architect, Howard Roark.
Explaining why he refuses payment and credit on one particular project, Roark
says: “The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is
the work itself. My work done my way.”
Of central importance to The
Fountainhead is the distinction between the “first-hander” and the
“second-hander”—respectively, the person who acquires ideas and values
first-hand through contact with reality and the person who deals with the world
at one remove, adopting the opinions and tastes of others. Long before
Instagram, Roark describes the latter as the sort of person who “can’t say
about a single thing: ‘This is what I wanted because I wanted
it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.’”
Rand’s goal was to show us what it’s like
to see the world purely through one’s own eyes.
* * *
Ayn Rand is known for her politics, but as
she wrote, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I
am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.” The deepest theme in
her work is the need to see the world first-hand and to follow unfettered
reason wherever it leads in pursuit of the truth. “Freedom,” she wrote, “is the
fundamental requirement of man’s mind.”
The basic
need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any
form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed, or subordinated to any
consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in
motive.
The dominant contemporary “progressive”
doctrines, by contrast, are second-handedness turned into a system. “Critical
theory,” for instance, denies on principle our ability to see the world
first-hand, to see things as they really are, and instead insists that
everything is filtered through “social constructs.” We all have no choice, in
this outlook, but to be Peter Keating—leaving us vulnerable to manipulation by the
latest Ellsworth Toohey. The current variation on this outlook may be
relatively new, but it has deep philosophical roots to which Rand provided detailed philosophical answers, including in technical works of philosophy defending our ability to know reality first-hand in the deepest
sense.
But she had greater influence as a
champion of thinking as an ethos. This line from Atlas Shrugged, in particular, speaks to our age: “There are no evil thoughts except
one: the refusal to think.” This was not a mere rhetorical flourish. She really
did regard the refusal to think, not just as evil, but as the essence of evil.
In her morality, the most basic choice is the choice to think:
In any
hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But
you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is
your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the
question “to be or not to be” is the question “to think or not to think.”
Elsewhere, she wrote:
Nothing is
given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize
it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a
machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the
spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to
discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant
action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the
knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But
everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced
by him—by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind
To be “in focus” is the highest term of
praise in Rand’s philosophy, and the worst thing one can be is “out of focus.”
“Focus” here refers to “a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of
reality”—to thinking as a moral choice. It is her answer to
one of the oldest conundrums in philosophy: How can one knowingly do
evil? Her answer is that to be evil is to be deliberately out of focus. One
does evil because one does not know what one is doing—but the lack of knowledge
is not mere ignorance. It is the choice not to know, to push
knowledge out, to refuse to examine the meaning and implications of your
actions.
The doctrines now widely derided as
“wokeness” constitute a system for this kind of evasion. It offers a program of
self-censorship that consists of closing oneself off from the expression of any
ideas that might be labeled as wrong. Potentially offensive tweets, books,
comedy specials, statues—they all have to go, purged in a ritual of
purification. Paralyzed by the fear of evil thoughts, adherents embrace the refusal
to think.
* * *
But notice that the fully independent
man’s individualism is expressed, not just in his thoughts, but in his work.
In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark explains the “meaning of life”:
Roark got
up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one
fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the
resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want
of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”
“Your
strength?”
“Your
work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what
you make of it.”
This theme is developed most fully
in Atlas Shrugged. The settings for Rand’s novels tended to follow
her own experiences, but at a delay of a few years. Her first novel, We the Living, was about independent-minded students struggling to survive in the
early years of the Soviet dictatorship—just as she had been doing a few years
earlier. In The Fountainhead, her heroes were mostly artists and
intellectuals at the beginning of their careers, struggling to break through
with their creative visions. In Atlas Shrugged, written after she
had become a bestselling author who mixed with business magnates, her heroes
are businessmen who are also pursuing their creative visions,
but this time in the form of building rail lines and inventing new metal alloys.
Rand’s moral philosophy is best-known for
her defense of self-interest. But its real heart is her defense of the central
virtue that gives meaning to the self: productiveness, the embrace of work and
the spirit of work. Behind that is a rational, secular ethics in which morality is based on the requirements of human life, of
which the central requirement is productive work. It is, she wrote, the
recognition “that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to
lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body
is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your
mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road.”
* * *
A few years back, sociologists Bradley
Campbell and Jason Manning published an influential study in which they described three kinds of cultures, each defined by
what lends people status and gives their lives meaning and value. A culture
of honor is epitomized by the practice of dueling, using
violence to answer a perceived insult. In a culture of dignity—think
of Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, Jr.—one’s sense of value is
primarily internal and one can patiently bear injustice without diminishing it.
Campbell and Manning call our current culture one of victimhood, in
which the source of status and meaning is one’s claim to oppression, suffering,
and “marginalization.” Hence the obsessive ferreting out of “microaggressions,”
no matter how trivial.
This describes the activist Left, but it
also increasingly describes resentful American conservatives, who have adopted
their own obsession with victimhood and martyrdom—an insecure fixation on the fear that somehow,
somewhere the “elites” are looking down on them.
Rand’s answer lies in her advocacy of
productive work. In place of a culture of honor, or dignity, or victimhood, she
offered a culture of achievement, in which work, innovation, and
productiveness give life its meaning and value.
In my own book on Atlas Shrugged, I likened Ayn Rand’s approach to
the Ancient Greek legend of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, the two greatest poets of the early Classical world. Legend has it
that they met and tested their verses against one other in a kind of ancient
poetry slam. Homer ran rings around Hesiod, but the judge gave the award to
Hesiod anyway, because “he who called upon men to follow peace and husbandry
should have the prize rather than one who dwelt on war and slaughter.” This
sums up a basic problem that has resonated down the millennia. In more modern
times, defenders of the Enlightenment have lamented that the sturm und
drang of the irrational Romantics and their dangerous obsessions with
blood and soil, were usually presented in a more dramatic and stirring form
than the Enlightenment’s ideals of peace and scientific discovery.
Ayn Rand set out to correct this defect,
lending all the color and drama of literary Romanticism to the Enlightenment
values embodied by heroes who are architects, inventors, and philosophers. She
wrote the kind of novel in which two of the main characters bond over their
heroic effort to stem a break-out at a steel furnace:
In the few
moments which Rearden needed to grasp the sight and nature of the disaster, he
saw a man’s figure rising suddenly at the foot of the furnace, a figure
outlined by the red glare almost as if it stood in the path of the torrent, he
saw the swing of a white shirt-sleeved arm that rose and flung a black object
into the source of the spurting metal. It was Francisco d’Anconia, and his
action belonged to an art which Rearden had not believed any man to be trained
to perform any longer.
Years
before, Rearden had worked in an obscure steel plant in Minnesota, where it had
been his job, after a blast furnace was tapped, to close the hole by hand—by
throwing bullets of fire clay to dam the flow of the metal. It was a dangerous
job that had taken many lives; it had been abolished years earlier by the
invention of the hydraulic gun; but there had been struggling, failing mills
which, on their way down, had attempted to use the outworn equipment and
methods of a distant past. Rearden had done the job; but in the years since, he
had met no other man able to do it. In the midst of shooting jets of live
steam, in the face of a crumbling blast furnace, he was now seeing the tall,
slim figure of the playboy performing the task with the skill of an expert.
Rand’s style often caused her to be
misunderstood and dismissed as some kind of Nietzschean. But her goal was to
give the air of self-assertiveness and the dramatic intensity of the Romantics
back to the Enlightenment values of science, reason, and productiveness.
Critics may complain that she wrote for “adolescents,” but her appeal to
intelligent and ambitious young people is obvious: She understood that they
require a vision of a life of work as something more than drudgery, accepted
either as a duty or as an imposition.
She also understood that the young, when
inflamed with a passion for work and achievement, would devote themselves to
things more useful and edifying—and more personally fulfilling—than the
hectoring didacticism of the activist Left or reactive trollishness of much of
today’s Right.
The best outcome of the culture war is
that culture wins: Instead of trying to cancel other people’s projects, we
should respond with exciting creations of our own, highlighting what our
philosophy and worldview have to offer. As an answer to contemporary
grievance-mongering and self-pity, Ayn Rand’s vision of a culture of
achievement is worth taking seriously.
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