The Ayn Rand Century
Published by Yazad Jal February 2nd, 2005 in Ayn Rand / ObjectivismToday is the 100th birthday of Ayn Rand. I enjoyed all her books, fiction and non-fiction; was a founding member of the New Delhi Ayn Rand club; and well, owe a lot of my learnings in libertarianism to her. I grew up with browsing through her books in my parents library. When my father once saw me thumbing through An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology with glazed eyes, he pulled out Altas Shrugged, turned to Galt’s speech and insisted I read that first!
There are a lot of tributes on her today, and here are a few excerpts from the best. These pieces are well written, click on the links and read it all.
David Boaz, Vice President of the Cato Institute gives a great overview.
Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders emphasized its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. Ayn Rand insisted that socialism is not good enough for human beings.Her books attracted millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of the vivid, can’t-put-it-down novel. The people who read Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.
Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of big government and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.
Boaz also mentions one of my favourite Rand quotes.
Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, “Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?”, she replied with her usual fire, “I chose to be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?”
Roderick T. Long at the Mises Institute writes about her Contribution to the Cause of Freedom in a link rich article.
Rand’s influence on the libertarian movement is incalculable; despite her own frequent antipathy toward that movement and even toward the word “libertarian,” Rand played a crucial role in helping both to create new advocates of laissez-faire and to radicalize existing ones; Rand encouraged libertarians to view their standpoint as an alternative to, rather than a branch of, conservatism, and to base the case for liberty on moral principle and not on pragmatic economic benefits alone. Rand’s influence on popular culture is likewise enormous; an oft-cited Library of Congress survey of “most influential books” placed Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible.Rand owed much of her success to the power and directness of her writing style. She was a master at what one of my colleagues calls reductio ad claritatem, “reduction to clarity”— i.e., the method of refuting a position by stating it clearly—as when she wrote that “if some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor,” or when she summarized the view that human perception is unreliable because limited by the nature of our sensory organs as: “man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears.”
Ed Hudgins, Executive Director of the Objectivist Center talks of her Moral Defense of Freedom
Rand developed an ethos of rational self-interest, but this “virtue of selfishness” was not an anti-social creed for predators. Instead, it led Rand to her great insight that there is no conflict of interest between honest, rational individuals. Since individuals are ends in themselves, no one in society should initiate the use of force or fraud against others. All relationships should be based on mutual consent. This became the credo of the modern libertarian movement, found today in think tanks, publications and public policy proposals.True individualists would not debase themselves by living the life of a thief, whether robbing a store with a gun or their fellow citizens with a government mandate or wealth-redistribution scheme. Rather, they would take pride in taking responsibility for their own lives, actions and moral character. Rand wrote, “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.”
Thus an ethos of rational self-interest justifies and supports individual liberty; a free market - not a communist, socialist, fascist or welfare-state system - is the only one that protects the rights of each individual. Entrepreneurs, workers, business owners, professionals and all others need not justify their quest for the highest wages or profits or to seek permission from “society” or their neighbors; they are free to live their lives as they please as long as they respect the similar freedom of others.
Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute writes on the Appeal of Ayn Rand
The key to Rand’s popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days–the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”
Steve Chapman in the Washington Times comments on how mainstream her ideas have become. Update: I just found out that the original piece was published in the Chicago Tribune (free registration required)
You can hear Miss Rand even in Bruce Springsteen: “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”That’s just one illustration of how her influence went beyond economics and political theory. In her eyes, there was no greater good than each person’s integrity and self-fulfillment. One of her essay collections had the surprising title, “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
Looking back, it’s hard to recapture how jarring that phrase was a generation ago, when altruism and self-sacrifice were seen as the central elements of an exemplary life. Today, Americans take it for granted that they are entitled to live for their own happiness, without apology.
It may seem curious to honor a writer who merely defended free markets, preached the superiority of reason over blind faith and extolled the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness. David Kelley, head of the Rand-oriented Objectivist Center, jokes that he’s reminded of the theatergoer who complained that “Hamlet” was full of cliches. Miss Rand’s beliefs have been so widely disseminated and absorbed that we have forgotten where they originated.
The truth is that for all she did, they are no longer her ideas. To a large extent, they are ours.
If you want more, there’s always Google News and Wikipedia has a “warts-and-all” page on Ayn Rand.
For me, every time I am on Bombay’s Marine Drive, I watch the skyscrapers at Nariman Point and muse over what Rand said in The Virtue of Selfishness “The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.”
21 Responses to “The Ayn Rand Century”
- 1 Trackback on Feb 2nd, 2005 at 10:33 pm
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Just playing devil’s advocate here:
Wasn’t much of the skyline of Bombay built in the era of License Raj?
Also — on New York — that skyline is a metaphor for capitalism, to be sure. But it is also almost entirely built with unionized labor.
Great to see all these quotes, but I want to hear more about what you think about why libertarianism is so great, and what it might mean in India.
Liberalization has been great, but the state is still utterly essential when it comes to protecting various minority groups, pushing the reform of backwards social values (things like outlawing dowry and child marriage), regulating business, and about a thousand other things.
Personally, I am in favor of constitutional liberal democracy w/ free markets, along the lines of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom. I’m not a big fan of Rand (though I respect her), and I find the more critical take on her centenary in the New York Times to be compelling.
This isn’t a flame — I find your blog quite interesting to read. I guess I’m just looking to hear you explain more about how you envision this working in India.
Quite a read ur blog. Dont u think it is too heavy for somebody on the net…just browsing by…
Thank you for the amazing post. It certainly helped me understand Rand a little better, and, definitely made my day.
Yazad you will be pleased to know that I find a lot of similarity between you and Rand especially this:
That seems to be a common tactic of her followers - Yazad, Julian, Sauvik and people like Lomborg - when things don’t stand up to close scientific srutiny - just write it as a work of fiction or better still publish it yourself. I applaud you for following in the footsteps of your idol - keep blogging!
Amardeep,
Let me know if the absence of unionized labor would have meant the Manhattan skyline would resemble that of interor Bihar.
No, but the point is, the United States has never been naked capitalism. It’s a welfare state: social security, medicare, a huge state bureaucracy.
Ayn Randism doesn’t have room for these things in its philosophy.
also, and maybe i’m in a minority…i just don’t like the way she writes. her characters are all too simplistic- all too black and white to make for very good fiction. she’s a product of a cold war world where given her background she found legitimacy, i’m not sure her fiction (taken purely as fiction) has very much merit. but that’s just my two cents.
I loved Fountainhead and remain an admirer of Ayn Rand. But the fact remains that she was a fundamentalist and an extremist. Consider one of her essays in the collection “The Anti-Industrial Revolution”. She takes the environmental movement apart calling them proxies of the communists. She makes perfect sense of course, but can anyone argue that environmentalists are not an integral requirement in an industrializing society?
I agree with Antara too, that she had a black and white vision on life. Probably in keeping in with her objectivism philosophy.
In the defense of Rand.
Ck, about not publishing in peer reviewed journals. Sure, thats a nice way of getting ideas through in a world then dominated by marxists!
Even today, there are areas in science where the establishment is so entrenched that alternate ideas don’t get serious enough study. Consider Jayant Narlikar’s struggle to get a research grant to study a version of the steady-state theory, especially when the big-bang cosmology is being seriously strained by new observations. Or consider the travails faced by the propounders of the electric cosmos theory. (including refusal of time on observatories)
Today’s majority scientific opinion openly admit that they know nothing about the majority of the substance in the universe, what they term as dark matter and dark energy. Despite that, they are not open to radical new theories.
And this is the state of physics, the most basic of sciences, dealing with phenomena that should be most “objective”. If this is the state of physics, imagine the state of philosophy.
I’m personally not a randian, as she has a very rigid viewpoint. But, peer review is not really the great system it is made out to be. I believe that the progress of science will truly happen when there is a push and pull between the people funded by patrons (eg. Galileo by the Medicis, or Rand, Crichton by sale of their books, or the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics by Mike Lazaridis) and the people in the “mainstream” of science (those going by peer review). Of course, these two categories may also have a lot of overlap.
Incidentally, this is quite analogous to the world of companies where there are private firms that report to very few trusted people and public companies that openly publish reports.
Amardeep,
Your points merit a new blogpost. There’s a lot more on Rand that I’ve missed, including some superb stuff on Reason.com and many interesting blogposts. I’d also take in your criticisms.
I have my disagreements with Rand (few) and with the way some of her followers behave (many, many). Note I linked to google news and wikipedia, both places have critiques as well as tributes.
I think her influence and her ideas are revolutionary, and we are still in the process of understanding them. BTW, she had a clear idea on the role of government. Read the chapter on “The Nature of Government” in Virtue of Selfihness (It’s also there as a postscript in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) An excerpt:
Hey, I see you’ve crystallised your thoughts on your blog. Even Reason is a bit critical of Ayn Rand. Why are you surprised? Libertarians have a right tradition of dialogue!
Antara, I think her fiction has great merit. She’s possibly one of the best examples of the romantic school. Read her Romantic Manifesto for more.
CK, it would seem Rand wrote more than fiction.
I loved atlas shrugged and ofcourse, fountain head. Those were really great pieces of work during her time and I think she was way ahead when compared to her contemporaries.
This is a tough thing to argue about, since we’ve never seen a government that acts the way Ayn Rand wants it to act in the quote you give.
I interpret her as saying something to the effect of “all creative force, including especially the idea of government-sponsored social reform, should be put into the private sphere.”
This can work, it seems to me, when the shape of a society is somewhat stable. In India’s case in its early years, the shape of the country itself was a question. How to handle language and ethnic differences? How to handle backwards social values?
The government needed to think creatively in order to reform society in certain ways so that the new country had a chance of staying together. This wasn’t just about enforcing laws in the constitution; this kind of thinking (call it “reformism”) was built into the process of composing the constitution itself.
The Hindu Code Act of 1950 is also an important example of this kind of thinking. It was intrusive of Hindu customs; most Hindu men at the time would have opposed it. (The government was too weak at the time to make the reforms apply to Muslims as well). But the reforms produced what I think were a net good. In liberal (or even libertarian terms), one can say that they helped to ensure the ‘individual rights’ of women.
I often think that the principles of libertarianism (even if it allows the encroachment of a nominal, ‘robot state’ to enforce criminal justice) only have potential to work in societies where people have thrown off the bonds of religion and family.
In India, both are hugely important. And both pull against individual freedoms.
Amardeep,
You’re confusing desirability with feasibility.
Let’s first discuss if you think what Rand is saying about government is desirable. How to translate that into changes in ground reality comes later.
The reality of today is changeable, we’ll have different paradigms tomorrow. Rand’s ideas belong to future paradigms. What do you think? Do you like that future or not?
I don’t think her goals are desirable because I think the shape of laws (and the concept of individual rights that accompanies them in a liberal society) is always defined in relation to the philosophy of the state.
In other words, individual rights don’t exist in a vacuum. They are dependent on historical contingencies, and the particularities of a given society.
That said, strong — but not absolute — protection of individual rights is important (and desirable to me), as is the concept of a state that aims to serve and protect those rights.
I find it revolting to hear someone advocate that individual rights are not absolute and not desirable! Someone advocating that must be the first one to give up his individual rights.
Rights are necessary *because* we live in a society. However, the particulars of a given society is *irrelevant* to the absolutism of fundamental rights.
Yazad,
Are you based in Delhi or Mumbai? I’ve been wanting to start a Mumbai Objectivist Salon, and was wondering if you had any tips/advice on the matter. Or better still, is there already a Mumbai club of Objectivism that I could participate in?
The greatest scientific texts of all time were never subject to peer review. These include Euclids elements, Netwon’s Principia, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, and Maxwell’s Electricity and Magnetism. So why is peer review so important?