Re: Landmark Education as a non-profit
Date: July 10, 2008 11:04PM
Hi Pauker,
You wouldn't be the first to make the connection between Ayn Rand and Werner Erhard.
You might enjoy this:
Iron Maiden; JOURNALS OF AYN RAND. Edited by David Harriman with
foreword by Leonard Peikoff . Dutton: 728 pp., $39.95:[Home Edition]
GARY KAMIYA. The Los Angeles Times. (Record edition).Los Angeles,
Calif.: Jan 4, 1998. pg. 10
Like heavy metal music, Kamikaze piloting and chugging bottles of
Boone's Farm Apple wine, Ayn Rand is one of those experiences that is
best appreciated by the very young. There may be some mature souls who
find themselves stomping along to her brazen one-note samba, but her
ideal readers are college sophomores who are trying to reinvent
themselves as jutting-jawed Heroes of Reason. You see them here and
there, the intense ones, clutching their copies of "Atlas Shrugged"
like backstage passes to the World Superiority Tour '97.
I was as high-strung and prone to self-aggrandizement as the next
19-year-old, but I avoided Rand. I had the idea that her work was
artistically tacky, philosophically rigid and vaguely scary, a kind of
literary precursor of est. Besides, all my rebellious uberteen
energies went into worshiping what I took to be a higher-grade seducer
of youth, Nietzsche. Recently, however, I read Rand's two major works,
"The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged," which may make me the only
non-Rand-disciple over 25 ever to voluntarily wade through 1,900 pages
of The Master. I cannot say that the experience was a pleasurable one,
but it has increased my store of information: I now know that her
novels are artistically tacky, philosophically rigid and vaguely
scary.
Rand may not be the worst novelist ever to pick up a pen, but she is
without a doubt the worst novelist ever to inspire a cult following
and sell zillions of books. Her novels are awe-inspiringly bad,
ludicrous on a heroic scale. They are comic books with Wagnerian
dialogue--like Danielle Steel channeling Milton Friedman, with some
fake Nietzsche-chips sprinkled on top. Their plots are
bottom-of-the-pile Hollywood schlock worthy of serving as fodder for
"Mystery Science Theatre 3000," complete with melodramatic courtroom
scenes, planes crashing near the SuperRand Fortress of Solitude and
heroes rushing in to pull their leader off a high-tech torture
machine. Rand's characters are clanking robots whose mouths jerk
mechanically as philosophical speeches appear in balloons behind them.
As for that dialogue, it is made of the finest hardwood veneers. A
sample 2-by-4: "You, the heir of the d'Anconias, who could have
surpassed all his ancestors of the miraculous hand that produced,
you're turning your matchless ability to the job of destruction. . . .
Yet you and I were the kind who determine the fate of the world."
What keeps you turning the pages, however, is that these books are not
just incredibly bad, they are incredibly weird. Their aridity, their
lack of development, psychological depth and flexibility is so
absolute that it is fascinating: You keep waiting for something light,
something human, something different to appear, and it never does.
Rand's formula is a rigor mortis-like adherence to her icy first
philosophical principles, combined with grandiose wish-fulfilling
plots. The results are simultaneously banal and hysterical: like
Aristotle (the only philosopher she respected, despite his many
"errors") crossed with Mickey Spillane (her favorite contemporary
novelist).
Rand's works have a bizarre tone, at once smug and shrill,
sadomasochistic and sentimental. Her psychosexual ventings can be best
observed in the sex scenes in "The Fountainhead," which read like a
cross between a Harlequin romance and the woollier ravings of the
Marquis de Sade. Take this unusual come-hither speech delivered by the
heroine, Dominique Francon, after she has intentionally caused Mighty
Rand Hero No. 1 and super-Wrightian-architect Howard Roark to lose an
important commission: " 'You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you
for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I will
fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won't be able
to reach. I have done it to you today--and that is why I shall sleep
with you tonight. . . . I have hurt you today. I'll do it again. I'll
come to you whenever I have beaten you--whenever I know that I have
hurt you--and I'll let you own me. . . . What do you wish to say now
?'
'Take your clothes off.' "
Well, whatever turns you on. But after 700-odd pages of this kind of
stuff--or, more commonly, of characters who bear an uncanny
resemblance to Ayn Rand's authorial voice constantly saying to each
other "I love you because in my rational calculation you are worthy of
my lofty respect"--one begins to grow somewhat restless.
Rand's defenders might object that hers are novels of ideas, formal
experimentations more like philosophical arguments than conventional
works of fiction, and so should be judged by different standards.
Certainly Rand's novels contain eloquent arguments for her central
ideas--in particular, her exacting individualism (an important
intellectual source of contemporary libertarianism) and her critique
of altruism. But even novels of ideas are not necessarily
philosophical arguments: To succeed as fiction, they must--like such
exemplary works as Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," Mann's "Dr.
Faustus," Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" and Melville's "Moby
Dick"--embody their ideas in characters that have an imagined
existence independent of those ideas. It is the imagination, open to
irrationality and irony, to chance and humor, that is the true
laboratory in which ideas are tested in fiction.
But Rand's talents were purely cognitive. As her prosaic cookie-cutter
journals indicate, she had little imagination and no humor. Her books
are reenactments of giant chess games in which the characters are mere
pieces and the outcome is foreordained. One of her countless vile
"second-handers" (Randspeak for a parasitic person who derives all her
values from what others think) is no more going to be revealed to have
hidden virtues than a pawn is going to start moving like a knight. In
the Rand universe, the bad guys always wear black hats and have
ignoble faces, often with weak, ugly mouths. (To give her her due,
Rand does write excellent gargoyles, and some of her villains--in
particular the bizarre, effete archvillain Ellsworth M. Toohey--are
weirdly memorable.)
Rand may be the only fiction writer ever to denounce irrationality as
evil, and reading too much of her work can make you feel like a POW
deprived of dreaming sleep by sadistic captors. Her
hyper-rationalistic, Manichean credo prevented her from even trying to
imagine exceptions to her tenets: If a Randian hero were to have an
affair with an "unworthy" woman, or a villain were to turn out to be a
great artist, her entire system would fall apart. Philosophically, her
arguments can be potent; in fictional terms, they are completely
tautological. She is the great enemy of collectivism, but in certain
ways, her works resemble their exact ideological opposites: novels of
Socialist Realism, the "boy-meets-tractor" schlock cranked out by
Stalinist party hacks in the Soviet Union.
Grandiose, intense, bombastic, hypnotic, sterile, it is a fascinating
body of work, larger than life and twice as clumsy, and the reader is
bound to wonder what sort of person could have created it.
Unfortunately, if not particularly surprisingly, the recently
published "Journals of Ayn Rand" sheds very little new light on that
subject or, for that matter, on any other. Indeed, it's hard to
imagine what audience, outside of Rand scholars or acolytes interested
in the minutiae of how Rand composed her books, these journals will
appeal to.
"Journals of Ayn Rand" consists of a chronological presentation,
starting in 1927 and ending in 1966, of most of Rand's unpublished
work. It includes early material written when she was working as a
Hollywood screenwriter, notes to herself written before and during the
writing of her novels "We the Living," "The Fountainhead" and her
magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," as well as extensive notes for a
never-published philosophical treatise titled "The Moral Basis of
Individualism," a defense of the House Unamerican Activities
Committee's investigation of Hollywood Communists (Rand's testimony
before HUAC is also included) and late notes for her last proposed
novel, "To Lorne Dieterling" (which was never written).
In his introduction, editor David Harriman, who appears to have done a
creditable job of selection but whose evident status as a True
Believer renders him insufficiently critical, writes "this book
presents AR's working journals--i.e., the notes in which she developed
her literary and philosophical ideas. Notes of a personal nature will
be included in a forthcoming authorized biography." Alas, if ever a
book needed "notes of a personal nature," it's this one. There are a
few items of interest here but, for the most part, it's tedious
inside-baseball stuff, mere construction scaffolding, a pale
simulacrum of her novels.
A writer's journal can reveal an intellectual odyssey, provide
valuable insights into how major works are written, recount the
writer's quirks and wrong turns and inspirations; it can also achieve
its own literary greatness. Rand's journals do none of these things,
for three reasons. First, she had no intellectual odyssey. As Rand
herself proudly proclaimed, and as her sensitive former disciple
Barbara Branden demonstrates in her remarkable biography "The Passion
of Ayn Rand," Rand's literary and philosophical ideas were formulated
very early in her life and never changed substantially. "I have been
asked whether I have changed in these past twenty-five years," Rand
writes in her introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of "The
Fountainhead." "No, I am the same--only more so." How do you spell
r-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n?
That Rand held essentially the same views all her life is shown in the
"Journals" by notes she wrote when she was 23, for a never-written
novel called "The Little Street." "Show that the world is monstrously
hypocritical," she exhorts herself. "That humanity has no convictions
of any kind. That it does not know how to believe anything. That it
has never believed consistently and does not know how to be true to
any idea or ideal. That all the 'high' words of the world are a
monstrous lie." A bit later, in notes about the novel's hero, she
writes, "Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob and
intensely, almost painfully conscious of it. Restless. High-strung. An
extreme 'extremist.' A clear, strong, brilliant mind. An egoist, in
the best sense of the word."
These pronouncements about the vileness of the world and the
how-dare-you-approach-me-varlet hero are Randian to the core: They
embody a vision from which Rand never deviated. Harriman argues that
"The Little Street" "was not a novel she could have written; to her,
the purpose of fiction writing is not to denounce that which one
despises, but to exalt that which one admires." But Rand's novels,
though putatively celebratory, overflow with bile: ostensibly
"joyous," they are spectacularly weighed down by the spirit of
gravity, by hatred and contempt for mankind. (The "happy ending" of
"Atlas Shrugged," in which a handful of noble spirits leave the world
to stew in its corrupt juices while they pursue their superior
destinies in a Rocky Mountain fastness, is a fairy tale that only
heightens the pervading sense of despair.)
The second reason that Rand's journals aren't interesting is that her
fiction--expository, told not shown, with authorial finger always
pressing blatantly on the moral scales--is virtually indistinguishable
from her nonfiction. Her journals are simply weaker, less polished
versions of her novels: There's not enough difference between the two
forms to make the informal one interesting. Reading her notes on the
character of Howard Roark or John Galt, or on Galt's notoriously
interminable speech, is like reading an earlier, slightly less elegant
version of a complex mathematical proof that was later published in a
professional journal: There's really no point. Of course, these
reasons pale beside the third one, which is that Ayn Rand is just not
a very good writer--and the journals of a mediocre novelist hold
limited appeal.
Yet it would be wrong to deny that there is a burning core in Rand's
work: an intense apprehension of the possibility of living without
illusion, without the comforts of religion or of group thinking, in
some icy region far above the flabby, flat compromises most of us make
sooner or later. Even through her inept fictional constructions, this
fire can be felt.
But in the end, Rand's flame burns in a void. Her work is an endless
hall of mirrors, reflecting only an enormous eye and empty space. For
all of her Nietzschean praise of "the Earth," Rand took no delight in
the things of this world; she never learned, in his phrase, to "stop
bravely at appearances." A chill instinct, at once noble and callow,
led her to separate herself from mankind, but she was unable to forget
those she despised and go her own way. To feel superior to others is
to allow them to define the terms of one's identity: The master cannot
be aware of the slave without ceasing to be the master. By a
tremendous irony, Rand, the self-willed one, the enemy of all borrowed
thoughts, was walled into a nutshell by other people.
She once wrote, "one of the most effective lines in 'The Fountainhead'
comes at the end of Part II, when in reply to Toohey's question: 'Why
don't you tell me what you think of me?' Roark answers: 'But I don't
think of you.' " Rand always did think of those she despised, she
despised too much--and that is why her books resonate not with music
but with the clang of useless iron.
Credit: Gary Kamiya is the executive editor of Salon Internet
(http://www.salonmagazine.com)