Thursday, January 27, 2005

Ayn Rand, Hopeless Romantic

The woman who wrote Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and several other books and essays relating basically the same point would have been 100 years old yesterday, if people not belonging to the House of Winsdor actually lived that long. Andrew Stuttaford, who writes for National Review, has this assessment of her in yesterday's New York Sun (Hat tip: The Corner). It's full of the usual praises and criticisms well-known to Rand fans: she was the sterling defender of capitalism as a moral system, and socialism's most determined critic on both moral and practical grounds. She was also a bit of a screeching harpy, a semi-cult leader, and a rather sub-par fiction author. She's Annie-One-Note, whose stories have all the predictability of a medieval morality play. The good capitalists triumph without even lifting a finger, guarded by truth; the evil socialists devour each other and themselves like the legendary snake.

All of which has the virtue of being true, so far as anyone knows. But what many commentators ignore is that Rand was making an economic as well as a moral argument; that the people who clamor the loudest to soak the rich for the sake of the poor are untrained in managing the vast institutions that the rich do. Seen in that light, Atlas Shrugged becomes not just an ideological tract but a historical lesson in how socetal decline begins, one which is in line with Marx's writings on how it's always the middle class that unseats the upper.

Yet I come to bury Rand, not to praise her. She belongs to the 20th Century, and to the 20th Century, with its Verduns and its Buchenwalds, its Great Societies and its Gulag Archipilagoes, let us consign her. For she believed without question in one precept that the majority of the intelligensia of her age also believed: that sex was free, without cost, and without any purpose than physical satisfaction.

If any of Rand's fiction has a point other than "capitalism good, socialism bad," it's that sex ought to be liberated from the whiney demands of bourgeois morality. Dagny Taggart has an extended monologue about it in Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead begins its main romantic attachment with what bears many of the earmarks of sadomasochism, if not rape. Sex as a procreative act appears almost nowhere in her fiction; despite all the sex and all the marriages, nobody ever gets pregnant. There is a mention at the end of Anthem of what the hero will teach his sons, but Anthem was Rand's first novel, and it is the man who speaks of his future generations, not the woman, and he speaks of them as the future Warriors of the Truth.

Of course, such was de rigeur for most female intellectuals of Rand's century, but it fascinates me that this glaring omission from her own ideas has not received more notice. For Rand, physical reality was the only reality, and man's conceptual faculties were the masters of reality. A can be transformed into B, but not until you accept that A is A. Naming A to be B will not work. Yet the universal physical fact of human existence, the fact that we are all born of woman, is not regarded as relevant to Rand's ideas about the one act which leads to every person born of woman. Sex, to Rand, is a physical act with spiritual flavor, an act of will done according to one's aesthetic. The body demands it, but it feeds the soul, and there is absolutely nothing else to be said about it.

For a proud empiricist, this is little short of preposterous. Here Rand's rigid Apollonianism has made a hole for Romantic gooshiness to enter. Children, by nature, violate her dictum that no one must be made to live for anybody else. Therefore, the act that makes childrem must be re-imagined as something other than what it has been since eons before humanity ever engaged in it. The result of this re-imagining is every bit as esoteric, and has been every bit as harmful, as the faux-altruistic slush that Rand pilloried in every word she ever wrote.

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