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What I’m Reading Now 6

Posted February 7, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

This series tracks the books I read, and has nothing to do with immigrations.

What I’m Reading Now: Lincoln: Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
What I Just Finished Reading: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns, Oxford (2009)

Last month I finished Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and a few people told me they thought I was a bit excessive in my judgment of the novel’s poor writing and dumb ideas.

So, not liking Rand’s masterpiece, I, of course, decided to read the major biography of her that appeared last year.

Well, really two major evaluations of her life and work came out last year. I read the one by the author who seemed to like Rand better.

Now, I have long thought of Rand as Nietzsche for the boo-boisie, and Jennifer Burns in Goddess of the Market seems to confirm the strongly derivative nature of Rand’s early theorizing. Nothing wrong with deriving from Nietzsche, but unlike Rand, the German philosopher was a great stylist, encapsulating his gems in aphorisms that brightened many a dreary Buffalo day during my college years.

Rand enjoys an amazing following decades after her death. In 2008, her novels sold 800,000 copies. They have rarely dipped below 400,000 volumes sold in any recent year. [Take that, Friedrich!] And yet, Burns says, there is a “nearly universal consensus among literary critics that she is a bad writer.”

Bad writing has not diminished her impact. Her political influence has been phenomenal, from the hour-long special about her last month on FOX News to the resonance she has with the more technological members of Richard Florida’s “creative class”. Burns says that she is “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the Right” for many young people.

Rand is also an immigrant success story. She was a wealthy young person in Russia with servants, cooks, and tutors, whose life was overturned by the Bolshevik Revolution. She came to the U.S. not penniless, but virtually unknown and earned a living by her pen in a language she did not learn until she reached adulthood.

But Rand was as full of contradictions as the great American anti-hero Jay Gatsby. She was a partisan of reason who was ruled by her emotions. She insisted on the truth, but carried on a debilitating extramarital affair that she hid from her followers. She was an avatar of individualism who lived surrounded by a conformist cult, and she insisted that women engage in “manworship” while she emasculated her own husband.

Rand received an excellent education in revolutionary Russia because the Bolsheviks removed restrictions on the entry of Jews and women into the country’s best school. But it is hard to see how she could have survived under Stalin, who came to power shortly after her departure for America. Her ideas would have attracted the attention of the secret police and she would likely have become another victim of his terror if she had not left.

When she came to America, Rand moved quickly to Hollywood. She loved American popular culture and was an early intellectual who appreciated the value of entertainment for the masses. She also appreciated the value of sex.

As a very poor young Hollywooder, a wealthy patron took pity on her and gave Rand $50 to help her survive. She used the money to buy sexy lingerie.

She also became fascinated with William Hickman, a young thrill killer. She admired his Nietzschean “will to power” and made him the central character in one of her first fictional works. Violence as an expression of superiority would be a hallmark of her writings. For example, in her first play, her superman hero rapes his female assistant on her first day of work. And she loves him for it.

The admiring depiction of violence, particularly sexual violence, in Rand’s work should be enough to turn off religious conservatives. But she is also notoriously anti-religious. In her 1934 philosophical journal she wrote that she wanted to be the “greatest enemy of religion.” She may not have been religion’s greatest enemy, but she sure was a dick about her brand of aggressive atheism. She referred to Christianity, which she accused of elevating concern for one’s neighbor to and equal footing with concern for one’s self, as “the kindergarten of Communism”.

Rand’s first really successful work was The Fountainhead. She described her hero Howard Roark approvingly as having been born “without the ability to consider others”, a condition we would today identify with the severest forms of autism. Her lack of regard for the “other” was reflected in her criticism of democracy, which she faulted for giving the same rights to everyone. She believed that there should be a “democracy of superiors only”. While she later softened this stance and claimed she found wisdom in the common man, there has always been a stink of extreme elitism about Rand’s theories. Which explains some of her popularity. Misfits often fancy themselves as misunderstood geniuses.

The Foutainhead also contains a violent rape scene where the superman violently forces a woman to have sex and brutalizes her:

He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit ... the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.

When the woman later surveys in a mirror the bruises left by Roark, she begins to worship him, as all Randy women do with their abusers. NOTE TO TEENAGED RANDIANS: Don’t try this at home. Rape carries a 5 year term, no matter how artistically you bruise your victim’s genitals.

During the 1940s Rand met a real-life superman.

Hold your breath. It was….

Wendell Wilkie.

‘nuff said on this subject.

In 1941 Rand became obsessed with the belief that the Communist Party was about to take over the United States. Now her anti-Communism was entirely understandable. She had left what she felt was a stultifying egalitarianism in the mid-1920 in Russia and had learned of the evolving terror under Stalin from her family who remained behind. By 1941 there was ample evidence of Stalin’s crimes and the mass killings in the USSR were starting to be publicized.

But, while there were definitely communists in the Hollywood community, as well as in the emigre Jewish circles she was familiar with, the Communist Party in the U.S. was paltry, with fewer than 100,000 members and perhaps two to three times that many sympathizers. The recent Hitler-Stalin pact had driven many anti-fascist and Jewish members out of the party, and it had been hemorrhaging support since 1936. Communism, however despicable its doctrines, was never a force in American politics and by 1941 was in decline from its none too lofty heights at the start of the Great Depression.

Rand decided that the best way to counter Communism was with an individualist’s manifesto. She declared that all creative acts spring from an individual, not from a collective process. She uses an analogy to childbirth, writing that “all birth is individual. So is all parenthood.” My son’s birth must have been aberrational since it began with collective action by my wife and I and, after a nine month construction process, ended with the both of us changing diapers in a little collectivity I like to call a “family”.

Rand became more and more important in right-wing circles during World War II and the Cold War. She commanded large fees for meetings with top corporate execs. But her relationship with other right-wing intellectuals was not very good. For example, the economist F.A. Hayek, a conservative god today, was described by her as a secret communist. She also got into a battle with Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of the “Little House on the Prairie” author. Lane had actually published some of the books her mother had written, altering them to adopt a conservative individualist frame. But Rand attacked her for using phrases like “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself”, which Rand viewed as proto-communistic. Rand believed that working for the good of others is immoral and saw nothing but immorality in the “Little House’s” Christian bromides.

Rand was pretty thoroughgoing in her opposition to government programs. She opposed Social Security and aid to education, for example, but she apparently did think the government had a role in making better movies! She testified before Congress about the need to make movies more moral, by which she meant more pro-capitalist. She told the House Un-American Activities Committee that communism was rife in the movie industry.

She was also concerned that that the Catholic Church, then going through a conservative retrenchment, was tending towards socialism. Rand was the sort to find a Red in every bed, as we used to kid.

Rand’s own bed was getting a bit scarlet as well. She had married a good looking, nice guy, Frank O’Connor. The kind of man who wouldn’t rape his secretary on her first day.

Frank was a modestly talented artist and actor, who was also extremely supportive of his wife’s literary career. But support was not enough. Rand gradually came to dominate her husband, eventually forcing him to give up his avocations and occupy a uniquely humiliating position in her life.

In the late 1940s, Rand met a handsome young man named Nathan Blumenthal. As she had surrendered her Jewish name of Alisa Rosenbaum, he had to change his name to Nathan Branden. Branden was quickly brought into her bed. Rand exercised amazing control over her much younger lover, guiding him into a marriage with another young follower that would allow her to access his sex, while providing a cover of secrecy.

She also began to assemble a cult around her called “The Collective” which gave her unquestioning obedience. The most famous of the “collectivists” was Alan Greenspan. She called him “The Undertaker”.The Collective’s weird willingness to accept her guidance was fueled by her philosophy called “Objectivism” which holds that ethics can be logically derived by individuals acting selfishly. She denied the primacy of instinct or emotion in human behavior. Since the human is basically a thinking machine, individuality essentially disappears.

In the psychological sphere, the objectivist believes that concern about the welfare of others is a pathology. The emotions are secondary. But in Ayn and Brandon’s adulterous affair, emotions ran wild.

After it began, Rand called the two offended against spouses together to explain to them that her sexual encounters with a man 20 years younger than herself were an expression of her rational self-interest. She informed them that she would be allowed a few private hours with Branden each week to have sex with him. Poor Frank had to leave his own apartment twice a week when Branden showed up to service his wife. Frank turned to booze to soften the embarrassment.

Ayn Rand said that her most famous superman was based on the man she loved. She said that John Galt of Atlas Shrugged was her husband Frank. Then again, sometimes she said Galt was based on Branden. So Galt was either a boytoy or an emotionally impotent cuckold, I suppose.

In the late 1950s, Rand published her most famous book, Atlas Shrugged.

In Atlas Shrugged, the band of heroes are, with the exception of Galt, not self-made men. Most are inheritors of great wealth. They own some of the greatest businesses in the world. And they are brutal in their self-regard and Rand exalts and proclaims their selfishness. Conservative National Review said of the book: ‘From every page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard…commanding ‘To the gas chamber-go’”. The National Review saw a dangerous Utopian in Rand, such as had caused the Nazi and Soviet calamities of the 20th Century.

Rand’s response was to have her followers send letters out comparing National Review to the Communist Daily Worker!

Atlas Shrugged was rejected by intellectuals on the Right and Left, not because of its politics, but because it was seen as just the latest failed attempt to create a totalizing ideology.

Of course, such totalizing ideologies, failed or not, are precisely what appeals the most to the young, particularly the geeky young. And this was the corner of the intellectual market Rand came to occupy. Conservative students believed that if only they could master Rand, then everything would be explained.

After Atlas Shrugged, as her fame grew, her work declined below even her previous low standards. Her drug addiction, begun a decade earlier, took its toll on her health and personality. She authored really crappy pieces like “JFK: High Class Beatnik”, which sounds like the title of a 1950s pulp novel. She also called Kennedy the creator of the “Fascist New Frontier”.

She did enjoy dining out on her celebrity at places like the Playboy Mansion, which she pronounced a “wonderful place”.

Predictably, she opposed the 1965 Civil Rights Act, calling it the “worst breach of property rights in…American history”. Her book on Objectist ethics had nuggets like: “The principal of trade is the only ethical principal for all human relationships.” She repeatedly told audiences that the highest virtue was selfishness. She also said that all taxes are immoral and proposed paying for government through voluntary contributions and lotteries.

In the ‘60s, Rand was a media star, appearing in Playboy and making multiple appearances on Johnny Carson’s show. Ted Turner erected 248 billboards with the words “Who Is John Galt?” around the South.

Right-wing students, reacting against the New Left on campus, turned to her to create a new movement called Libertarianism based on many of her ideas. That was a problem. It was based on many, but not all, of her ideas. She hit the ceiling and began threatening to sue anyone who used her ideas who was not part of her insular cult, the Collective. She described the rightist Libertarians who claimed her as their godmother as “worse than…the New Left”. All the while she claimed that her “philosophy”, which most philosophers considered Nietzsche without the clarity, was entirely original. She described anyone who mined her works for inspiration a “plagiarist”.

Then, when she found out that her lover, Branden was having an affair with another woman, besides his own wife, she fell apart emotionally and the Collective crumbled. Her sexual theory was that a man’s ethics were expressed through who he had sex with. How could Branden reject her, a sixty year old embodiment of the highest ethical values, and sex up a mere girl? It wasn’t supposed to work that way. When Branden informed her that her age, she was two decades older than him, made her sexually unattractive to him, she interpreted his sexual cooling off as a rejection of objectivism.

Rand became physically abusive of Branden and threatened to ruin him, which sounds selfish so it must have been moral. She and Alan Greenspan published an edict of excommunication against her disciple. Apparently the rule was “No Sex, No Philosophy”.

Burns does a bit of analysis of the Randian sexual body politic. “Rand’s theory of man worship [by women]...kept her ignorant of both [her husband] Frank’s and [Nathan Branden’s] inner emotional states. Although she called Frank a hero, in truth he was a passive and withdrawn man… The idea of man worship was a wishful fancy, as unattainable for her as the svelte physiques and Arian figures of her heroines… Rand identified Nathan [Branden] as a hero, a paragon of morality and rationality” but was confused by his sexual duplicity. Her abuse of Frank left him a broken alcoholic.

Randian psychology had other problems as well. Many of her followers paid large sums to be treated by her “therapists”, often unlicensed devotees. They would tell her the secrets divulged by their “patients”. As is clear from her treatment of Branden, she was not someone to place in a position of trust.

When Rand finally died, her remaining followers placed an enormous topiary in the shape of a dollar sign, her one sacred symbol, next to her casket. She had preached that money is the unit of value for all things. By that standard, with her books bringing in millions of dollars in revenues every year from pimply boys who think they are the ubermench, Rand keeps marching on. God may have closed the Gates of Heaven to her, but she could still find a spiritual resting place inside the Federal Reserve’s vaults.

NOTE: A second Rand bio was published last year Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne Heller. I have glanced through it and it looks as good as the Burns’ bio. As I said, I read Burns because she seemed less antagonized by Rand, not because I thought any the less of Heller. Here is a video of Burns discussing Rand: