A repellent thinker

Whittaker Chambers inoculated me against Ayn Rand. So, unlike many other male adolescents my age, I never bothered to read her big books. Today I enjoyed reading this about her and her "ideas." A few excerpts from "Atlas Schlepped":

Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Rand’s novels and essays achieved enormous popularity. Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on college campuses; a handful of influential figures, most notably Alan Greenspan, the future chair of the Federal Reserve, were at one time her disciples; and her books have sold tens of millions of copies. Although serious scholars and journals regarded her novels as devoid of literary merit, they felt obliged to argue with them. For a while, there was no escaping Ayn Rand. ....

Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged. “We have no laws in this valley,” Galt explains, “no rules, no formal organization of any kind.... But we have certain customs, which we all observe.” The Soviet Union regarded Communism, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, as the ultimate social system. Galt’s Gulch features a dollar sign three feet high, and when Rand died, her body lay in a funeral home beside one twice that size. ....

Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

With ambiguity and compromise characterized as moral treason, Rand’s novels feature principled heroes and dastardly villains, just like socialist realist fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Rand argued for what Soviet theorists called “the positive hero,” the perfectly virtuous person who speaks the indubitable truth. Rand’s novels all contain such spokesmen, typically male, who display the physique of a Greek god, the nobility of a hero, and the charisma accompanying absolute self-confidence. ....

...Jews should be grateful that Rand did everything possible to conceal her background. The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.

Assign her instead to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers that Rand’s ideas can cause no measurable damage. Neither can her fiction much diminish the glories of Russian literature. A canon including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov can hardly be marred by a few puerile novels. Atlas Shrugged, remarked Dorothy Parker, “is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Atlas Schlepped," Jewish Review of Books, Fall, 2014.