Ayn Rand, and "honest" misinterpretation?

Personally, I found the article wide-ranging and quite compelling. My reading is that Turner is viewing Rand within the cultural context of her times, a context that encompasses social, economic, artistic, moral, as well as political themes.

This period -- the mid-20^th century -- was dominated by Modernism, and since the review is of a biography of Rand, Turner is seeking Rand the person. She believes the best way to know Rand is to analyse the novels: “But really, storytelling was Rand’s talent, and it is in her novels that her vision takes its truest shape.”

What she finds in those novels are a number of themes that exemplify Modernism, the movement that dominated Anglo/American and European culture from the 1920s through to the 1950s.: “…an extreme version of the Modernist morality-and-architecture trope, that, as Roark puts it, ‘a house can have integrity, just like a person.’”

Besides purity and simplicity in architecture, other Modernist themes include: the artist as revolutionary; radical emancipation from traditional values and social arrangements; a spirit of movement and change; the superiority of the planned over the organic; a preference for the urban over the rural; glorification of the machine; a desire to dominate the natural environment.

Rand’s fiction displays enough of these qualities, and in sufficient strength, to qualify her as a Modernist in outlook. This is not to say that Rand was in total accord with Modernism; we know her views on modern art, for instance. But Modernism was not a unified movement, and there were as many currents and cross-currents – including fascism -- as in any widespread cultural movement.

But Rand’s fiction also displays additional themes: the hero who disdains conventional morality; glorification of the untrammelled ego; life as struggle; sex as conquest; the eroticisation of technology; an elite who command by right of natural endowment; society organised in a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors; the creation of the Ideal Man.

These themes are the sharp strokes that give the novels their power, and which reveal Rand’s world-view. They also happen to be themes that are regarded as culturally “fascistic”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Rand had any sympathies for the fascist political regimes of her time, or that she desired an oppressive social order. But it does reveal an affinity with the fascist cultural world-view.
Brendan

A definition is just a précis of an already existing theory, so one may as well cut to the chase and deal with the theory, or theories, directly. But I think I understand the point you’re getting at: fascism is usually associated with an authoritarian social and political order and opposition to individualism.

In their politics, most Objectivists probably think within the framework of classical liberalism, and assume that Rand’s context is the same. I’m not so sure. Since Rand’s politics is grounded in her ethics, it may be helpful to consider her ethical formulation, which begins: “Man’s life is the standard of value…”

Now, Rand’s epistemology claims that a concept means all the concretes that it refers to. In the case of “man’s life”, those concretes would be the lives of all existing men, past present and future.

But the lives of men are many and various, and Rand would regard many lives as falling short of the standard. In that case, the concept “man’s life” cannot refer to all actual existing men. It must refer to something else. My guess is that the referent is an abstraction: Rand’s ideal man, as exemplified in John Galt.

And that’s a problem, both for Rand’s epistemology and her ethics. If she is to retain her is/ought integration, she must be able to ground her standard in the actual lives of really existing men. But many of those men will fail to embody the standard.

On the other hand, if her standard is to encompass the values she thinks we should pursue, she must ground that standard in the abstraction of the ideal man. But she achieves the latter at the cost of divorcing her ideal man from the general run of actual men: her ideal man exists only as words on a page and images and emotions in the mind.

The assumption is that when Rand speaks of individual rights, by “individual” she means each and every existing man. But she often gives the strong impression that the “true” individual is far removed from the common stock. Galt’s Gulch is the prototype of the new society, inhabited by the elite few. The common run of men are “savages”, “parasites”, “grotesque little atavists”, fit only for pushing machine buttons and sweeping factory floors.

As for authoritarianism, when he speaks to the nation, Galt is not inviting his opponents to a debate, nor is he giving his listeners handy hints on rational living. He’s commanding his listeners, telling them what they should be thinking and how they should be acting. 

This is the fascist cultural world-view I was referring to: the authoritarian division of society into an elite who dominate by natural endowment, and an underclass who are fit only to follow commands.

Brendan

I can’t speak for “relativists”, but my preferred method of analysis is to examine the evidence and construct a reasoned argument. I highly recommend it.

A major advantage of this approach is that it enables one to recognise the same in others, and to distinguish rant from informed opinion. Three examples from the article in question illustrate my point.

Turner says: “As well as being a happily married woman, Rand was unhappily in love.” In replicating Rand’s habit of inverting orthodox pieties, Turner achieves three effects: she shows that she understands this aspect of Rand’s thought; she gives those readers unfamiliar with Rand a taste of the latter’s thinking processes; she piques the reader’s interest, and moves the narrative along.

The second example is a comment about Rand’s style: “The combination of sex, melodrama and architecture too is utterly un-Hollywood: it’s European...” This is about The Fountainhead, but when I read Atlas Shrugged, I was struck by this very aspect: the Atlas heroes are intense, grim, aloof, self-contained, principled. They’re the classic stereotype of the Russian intellectual, in marked contrast to the stereotypical American hero: relaxed, cheerful, friendly, open, pragmatic.

The third example has some direct relevance to this site: “Post-Rand, Objectivism has become more secular and suburban…” In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco gives up Dagny and risks his reputation and wealth in pursuit of his values. This site is dedicated to “activism”, but the activism has a marked sedentary character: writing articles, discussing articles, forming clubs, leading clubs, and of course, creating more websites so that the same people can continue to write and discuss yet more articles in a different location.

I have a strong suspicion that Objectivists prefer fantasising about a post-Atlas world rather than taking the risks required to create one, most likely because they have a greater stake in the existing order of things than in the uncertainties of the hypothetical new world. In other words, more Eddie Willers than Francisco.

Brendan