Double-Standards and Ayn Rand's Personal Life
by Andrew Bissell
The coverage of Ayn Rand’s centenary in American newspapers gives us some cause to celebrate Objectivism’s progress in making inroads in the national culture. On the whole, this coverage was characterized by respectful treatments of Rand’s life and her life’s work.
In many cases, though, this newspaper coverage also served as a sobering reminder that most of Rand’s critics (and even fellow-travelers like the writers at Reason) continue to seize on a few salacious details from her personal life to dismiss her monumental accomplishments in philosophy and literature. In review after review, it seems writers are compelled to clear their throats with a mention of Ayn Rand’s tumultuous past.
Tibor Machan has already penned an excellent essay, printed in The Free Radical, that closes the door on these unimportant details and exhorts intellectuals to “get to the meat” of Ayn Rand’s thought. I do not wish to attempt the Herculean task of upstaging Mr. Machan’s fine work. Nor do I wish to debate the morality of “The Affair,” now decades-old, that has become the favorite target of the Rand-smearers. Instead, I want to highlight the blatant double-standard of those who would dismiss Rand sight-unseen, while making nary a mention of the personal flaws of other philosophers and writers.
The following, then, is an abbreviated catalog of some Western thinkers, all of whom have been pardoned by the hypocrites who insist on re-trying and convicting Ayn Rand of having a marred personal life. These men are read, discussed, and taken seriously by college philosophy and literature departments that wouldn’t touch Rand with a 50-foot pole:
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788): This architect of the “noble savage” put all five of his children in a Paris orphanage. He also had an affair with a married woman twelve years his elder, and fled his sanctuary in Great Britain because of paranoid suspicions that David Hume was plotting against him.
-Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): In his last ten years of life, this advocate of “The Will to Power” was completely insane and dependent on the care of his sister, Elizabeth. He seems to have been in error when he wrote, “that which does not kill you makes you stronger.”
-Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): When he wasn’t busy joining the Nazi Party and purging his own book of a dedication to his Jewish mentor, this seminal existentialist had an extra-marital affair with his doctoral student, Hannah Arendt. His post-war life was marked by a cowardly refusal to come to terms with the crimes of Nazi Germany. In an interview he had been promised would be published posthumously, Heidegger placed the blame for the Holocaust on technology.
-Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): This well-known author is believed by many to have suffered from sexual insecurity—he called Ford Madox Ford impotent, and told Allen Tate that men only experience a fixed number of orgasms. He violated the Geneva Convention when he tossed 3 grenades into a cellar where SS officers were hiding. And his atrocious luck with a string of terrible injuries was only worsened by his own drinking and self-destructive behavior, culminating in his shotgun suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, after which he willed his Cuban estate to Fidel Castro.
I do not list these facts in order to dismiss the ideas of these writers and philosophers. On the contrary: the personal peccadilloes, quirks, and failings I have listed here should have been (and are) dismissed as irrelevant to the task of understanding these philosophers and scholars. So why can’t academics (and indeed, many Objectivists) do the same for Ayn Rand?
One hundred years after her birth and forty-eight years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, only one answer makes sense anymore: critics dismiss Ayn Rand because they have no reasoned conclusions and no substantive critiques with which to challenge her rigorous, integrated philosophy of Objectivism.
So let the National Review turn up its nose at Ayn the godless heathen, and leave the sundry left-wing hacks to mock her smoking habit for another hundred years. In the meantime, we’ll win the battles being waged in a far more important theater—the field of ideas.
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