Hey, Roark, build it yourself next time.
When I made my little quip about Ayn Rand last month, I thought I was just letting off a little steam about a long-held pet peeve. Well, it was a pet peeve with a rabid, and, as it turns out, resurgent following. That post got more comments than any in this blog’s brief existence. Apparently, as the economy continues to stumble along, Rand is on the rise, and she’s bringing out the lovers and the haters.
The Times noted it in a review of a new Rand biography. “In the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before.” GQ has jumped into the debate, with a long piece by some ex-impressionable teenager named Andrew Corsello, who apparently fell under Rand’s spell back in his school days, forgot all about her, and is stunned to find her name back in the press amidst an economic meltdown. And pretty angry about it himself.
I came across the Corsello piece via Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture; Ritholtz is another Rand hater. “Worst of all, Rand’s Objectivism has become the rationale for all manner of morally repugnant behaviour,” he writes, along with some of the anatomical arguments Corsello employs.
Most of the “money quotes” in Corsello’s piece contain language that can’t be printed in a family financial blog, so you’ll have to truck over there yourself if you want a taste. It’s a stylized, profanity-filled, invective-laced screed, to be sure. But while it’s fun to read, it doesn’t attack Rand’s idea as much as her followers.
I don’t remember exactly when I read “The Fountainhead.” I’m pretty sure it was some time after college; I know I wasn’t ever assigned it in a class. My two takeaways were boredom and annoyance; boredom at the bad storytelling, and annoyance at the obnoxious assertions.
Pick the greatest capitalist you can imagine. The greatest thinker. Got them in your head? Good. Now imagine them picking berries, freezing their skin off at night and running for their lives trying to avoid getting eaten by a bear, because without the collective strength offered by the group, no individual would be anything more than another link in the food chain. Maybe a high link, but a link nonetheless.
There is not one great figure of history, not Plato, Caesar, Michelangelo or even Rand herself, who wasn’t nurtured by their community. There is no art, architecture, science without a community. The Empire State Building would not have been built, the Divine Comedy not written. Michelangelo may have made his sculptures (and they are magnificent.) Who would have looked at them?
Even the pyramids needed slave labor.
Mankind’s greatest invention — the thing that allowed him to become more than just another animal and harness his mind toward even greater things — is society itself. John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates would be nothing without a stable society.
And Rand’s philosophy spits at society on every page. And that sneering contempt provided cover for a generation of government-is-bad bashing that made the levers of our government finally so impotent they couldn’t even arrest the growth a painfully obvious threat to the economy and the nation’s stability like the housing bubble.
It’s fine and right to laud the individual. But to have contempt for the society that allows that individual to flourish, to suggest that anybody who isn’t some Nietzschean uber-man is a moocher or a looter, is itself contemptible. The best want to leave society? And do what? What if society were to abandon them? How smart would Lloyd Blankfein look standing in the waters off the Hamptons in a loincloth trying to catch fish with a wooden spear? Not too smart.
It’s funny, but something came to mind that Lawrence Taylor, of all people, once said. The night the New York Giants retired the great linebacker’s number, Taylor, the first “LT,” in thanking his adoring fans, said during his halftime speech “there would have always had been a Lawrence Taylor, but without you, there wouldn’t have been an LT.”
We’re going to need to start paying attention to the people in the stands if we want to get past our current economic moment, because it’s the people in the stands who buy all the stuff that drives economic growth, because it’s the people in the stands who actually build the stuff. We’ve been playing to the cult of the individual for a long time now, and all it’s left us is a market crash and Kevin Federline.
Max
Paul Vigna
Randal
lucky
November 16, 2009
Bravo, Mr. Vigna.
I recommend this 1961 review by Gore Vidal:
http://www.esquire.com/features/gore-vidal-archive/comment-0761?click=main_sr
“She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.”
sounds familiar..