NATIONAL REVIEW NEW HIT PIECE ON RAND


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Ba'al's "hate the evil and love the good" uses words on a pre-adult, pre-philosophical level in a way similar to the use of terms like force before Galileo and Newton. Does Ba'al think such terms as hate and love and evil and good are so unimportant as not to merit rigorous definition and use?

The definitions in force are a result of the custom and usage in a community of speakers and writers. There is no God of the Tongues that chisels the True Meaning of Words onto tablets of stone. And you certainly are not the Arbiter of the True Meanings of Words.

Pick your definitions. This is a semi-free country.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Ba'al's "hate the evil and love the good" uses words on a pre-adult, pre-philosophical level in a way similar to the use of terms like force before Galileo and Newton. Does Ba'al think such terms as hate and love and evil and good are so unimportant as not to merit rigorous definition and use?

The definitions in force are a result of the custom and usage in a community of speakers and writers. There is no God of the Tongues that chisels the True Meaning of Words onto tablets of stone. And you certainly are not the Arbiter of the True Meanings of Words.

Pick your definitions. This is a semi-free country.

Ba'al Chatzaf

What, Bob, did my criticism strike too close for comfort?

Does this: "There is no God of the Tongues that chisels the True Meaning of Words onto tablets of stone." have some fixed objective sense?

What an eloquent confession the arbitrary banality of your own words your self-contradictory objections are.

Edited by Ted Keer
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Does this: "There is no God of the Tongues that chisels the True Meaning of Words onto tablets of stone." have some fixed objective sense?

Yes. Definitions are conventions agreed upon by the concerned parties. You seem not to understand that. You seem to think definitions are the same sort of things as objective facts of nature. Definitions are man-made artifacts and conventions, not a priori notions or even facts imposed by nature.

Communities of speakers/writers who want to exchange ideas manage to come up with definitions of words that enable them to communicate.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I think in the context of this thread discussing the Steorts National Review article, the dictionary definition that I used is the one that should be applied to the article. The definition is almost identical with those found on the Free Merriam Webster Online Dictionary and on others. The point of that article (to the extent that it has one - Steorts keeps dropping the ball) is that the Rand of Atlas Shrugged is consumed by an irrational hatred. But the examples that he gives are either trivial, distorted, or besides the point. Worse, since he does not really describe Rand's characterizations (much less her philosophy) his indictment fails. Except possibly in the strict dictionary definition which I offered ("to loathe, to detest"). Since he does not define his terms (what does he mean by "hate," and why is it inappropriate to "hate" [i.e., detest, loathe, strongly dislike] the Looters - given that they make repeated attempts to destroy freedom in America?), the article borders on incoherence.

OR, using the more "robust" descriptions of "hate" as Ted defines it, the article is even less convincing (gross understatement). Compared to the emotional intensity of the "shotgun blast" from the original Chambers article, this current NR article is more like,... well,... a squirt gun. And in both cases, Atlas Shrugged emerges unscathed.

Edited by Jerry Biggers
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The article is available to read on the NR website now. Far be it from me to advise someone not to read something, but in this case, it wasn't worth the investment. Just a waste of time.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244381/greatly-ghastly-rand-jason-lee-steorts

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Subject: Defining terms

Ted, here are relevant dictionary definitions that have genus and differentia ---> hate: to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for. genus: 'dislike' in the first case. 'feeling' or 'feeling aversion' in the second case.

Those are good definitions; they fit with the normal usage of the word.

I agree with you that a good definition should include both the pieces of information that a genus and differentia provide -- either explicitly or by strong implication. The genus of hate is of course, an emotion...but that genus does not have to be literally provided in the dictionary definition of every emotion, if it's implicit. We all know love is an emotion so these are acceptable: "a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. 2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend" as is "a strong positive emotion of regard and affection". There are many ways to word something, even a defnition.

Edited by Philip Coates
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Objectively, it could be tied to excessive concern with others, and so runs the risk of 'second-handedness.'

Do you consider this valid?

I don't have any doubt that one should consistently and fearlessly condemn and oppose wrong ('evil'), but the amount of sheer hatred seen amongst some otherwise thoughtful people, I find disturbing.

Tony,

Hatred is a human emotion in the meaning I discussed. As an emotion, it is no more second-hand than happiness is.

When it gets out of balance in both intensity and the time it is occupying the mind (especially if it hijacks cognition for long periods), it becomes dangerous. Many people do allow it to get to that state inside themselves through faulty evaluations and I agree that this is troubling.

Here is something I have noticed over time. People who hate excessively like to hate. They do it because they like it. And if what they hate goes away, they start hating something else.

Michael

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Maybe what Ba'al means is that there are different senses for words, and that people are entitled to use words in different senses. But It is strange that if that is what Ba'al, who is usually quite smart, actually means, he wouldn't just say it.

There are multiple senses for most words. There is obviously an essential difference between hate for a person (my definition) and hate for an inanimate object or an activity and so forth. But my sense is the primary one. The word hate derives its power from the power of the emotion one feels when one wishes to harm a person one perceives as intentionally (even if indirectly) harming oneself. You can't really say you know what hate is if you have not felt that emotion. I am quite sure Ba'al has felt it.

In any case, there are objectively better and worse definitions for different senses of different words, and if that were not true, Ba'al would have no reason to get so emotional when people describe his actions as foolish.

"To loathe" is not a definition. It is a synonym. And it is not an exact synonym. One does not loath a person with whom one is in a love-hate relationship, for example.

It would be quite silly if we were to try to interpret John David Stutts here as characterizing Rand as full of hate for low riding jeans, bubble gum, and people who talk loudly on cell phones in public places. Obviously Stutts is describing Rand as wishing evil on people. I do think she left herself open to that with the train scene - if I remember correctly there were children on board. But, Stutt's entire enterprise is dishonest. It's meant to use smears and innuendo to prevent people from even reading her.

Edited by Ted Keer
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For those who continue to maintain that Jason Steorts and John David Stutts are not the same person, I will grant the possibility. But the similarities, including their initials, their both being hitmen whose fame is derived from that of their victims, and so forth, makes me continue to suspect their identity. View this video and judge for yourself.

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Robert Tracinski agrees on my analysis of the motive behind the emotion:

"But the folks at National Review have their own agenda to protect, and it is precisely the surge in interest in Ayn Rand that motivates them to strike back at her in self-defense."

from http://www.tiadaily.com/

TIA DailyAugust 24, 2010

FEATURE ARTICLE

There They Go Again

Part 1: Repudiating Whittaker Chambers

by Robert Tracinski

A reader just sent me a link, with the explanation: "They're at it again."

And so they are.

"They" is the National Review, the leading publication of the religious wing of the mainstream right. And "it" is bashing Ayn Rand.

There is a long history to this. All the way back in the 1950s, when Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged—which I have described as "Capitalism's Epic"—was first published, William F. Buckley attempted to kick Ayn Rand out of the right. Her atheism and her ethics of individualism was a threat to Buckley's goal of cobbling together a "fusionist" coalition that would harness the pro-free-market wing of the right to the agenda of the religious traditionalists. He had to get Ayn Rand out of the way, and to add insult to injury, Buckley dispatched an ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, to do the job. The result was a sloppy, dishonest hit piece, which I dissected in 2005, when National Review Online decided to reprint the thing.

It was an odd decision on the part of National Review, since I thought the Chambers piece was an embarrassment they ought to bury somewhere down deep in the memory hole. Given the recognized power, ongoing influence, and large audience of Ayn Rand's ideas, why remind people that you stood out against them? At no time would that be more true than today, when the audience for and interest in Atlas Shrugged has peaked in response to the financial crisis and the Obama's administration's lurch toward socialism.

But the folks at National Review have their own agenda to protect, and it is precisely the surge in interest in Ayn Rand that motivates them to strike back at her in self-defense. So National Review has once again put Ayn Rand on its cover, with the headline "Ayn Rand Reconsidered." Maybe that's meant to sell more copies on the newsstands, because the actual cover article, by Jason Lee Steorts, does not really reconsider Ayn Rand. It largely repeats the same old line of attack.

And yet, there are some differences—which are revealing.

The "dog bites man" part of this story is the hostility expressed toward Ayn Rand, which includes all of the usual smears: that she is "dogmatic," mean-spirited, and "spiteful," that she is a bad writer who wrote "inept dialogue," that her appeal is primarily to adolescents. In service of this last goal, Steorts writes, preposterously, that the unforgettable Dagny Taggart, the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, comes across witha "Girl Scout banality" and "seems to have escaped from the young-adult section." I don't know what kind of "young adults" books Steorts has been reading, but if there's one thing Dagny Taggart is not, it's a character from a Judy Blume book. This is the kind of smear that itself comes from an adolescent, high-school-clique mindset—the use of ridicule to prey on the target's insecurities. It only works on someone who is eager to prove he is a sophisticated adult by renouncing any interest in the kind of nerdy books the cool kids don't like.

But the "man bites dog" part of the story, the part that made me raise my eyebrows, is that Steorts basically repudiates the central arguments of Whittaker Chambers's old attack on Ayn Rand. In a brief aside in the cover article, he writes: "Chambers's statement that the Randian voice commands 'from painful necessity,' his belief that Rand favors rule by a technocratic elite, and the title of his review, 'Big Sister Is Watching You,' are all, therefore, in error."

In a follow-up article, Steorts addresses the Chambers hit piece directly and at length, and the concessions keep coming. Chambers, he concludes, "does her an injustice." While Chambers claims that Ayn Rand advocated "a forthright philosophic materialism," Steorts admits:

Insofar as I am familiar with her writings and public statements, she had nothing kind to say about materialists. Certainly she rejected much that conventionally accompanies materialism; for example, she believed in the freedom of the will in contradistinction to causal determinism. And a minor theme of Atlas Shrugged is that its heroes, though denounced as materialists, are more capable of enjoying spiritual pleasures ("spiritual" here understood in a non-religious sense—she has in mind the capacity e.g. to love, or to feel profound aesthetic appreciation) than are their denouncers. I think the correct assessment is that Rand rejected any division at all between body and mind, material, and spiritual

And as for Chambers's depiction of Ayn Rand as a quasi-totalitarian "Big Sister," Steorts says, "This simply is not so." Ayn Rand's heroes, he notes, "fight precisely against the idea that any person or persons should be granted Big Brotherly responsibilities." He continues:

It will admittedly be the case, in a free society of freely transacting individuals, that those of superior talent enjoy a greater share of material abundance and influence. This outcome will be, in fact, an organic growth. But it is far from aristocracy, and to wield influence is not to rule. Chambers's elision of these ideas is a surprising piece of sloppiness from so intelligent a writer.

It's amazing what happens when you actually read the book; you notice things like Ayn Rand's crucial distinction between economic and political power. But the "sloppiness" of dropping this differentiation was not out of character for Chambers, which Steorts implicitly admits when he notes that a "quaintly Marxian...invocation of historical inevitability...pops up again and again throughout the review, every time Chambers says, effectively, 'I don't care what she claims to advocate—this is what it must come to in practice (but you'll have to take my word for it).'"

Well then, so much for the old Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged!

Steorts cannot restrain himself from bringing some of the old smear back to life, saying that Chambers was right to complain that Ayn Rand had a "dictatorial tone," whatever that means. Then there is this whopper: "I would go so far as to say that Rand, given the chance, might well have been a totalitarian."

"Given the chance"? Ayn Rand lived in Russia during the first decade of Soviet control. Wasn't that opportunity enough?

And yet, the heart of his main article is a genuine introspective report on how Steorts was inspired by reading Ayn Rand's earlier novel, The Fountainhead, when he was younger. He writes about "Rand at her best, which I believe is to be found in the second half of The Fountainhead," and he says this about the struggle of the conflicted character Gail Wynand:

I, too, want mightily for Wynand to hold out. He becomes magnificent, awe-inspiring, in the discovery of his integrity. When he does not hold out—when he betrays Roark rather than close his paper—I feel as I do when I dream I have done something unforgivable. When in his final conversation with Roark—whom he feels too guilty ever to see again, even though, as atonement, he has shut down the paper anyway—he commissions the tallest building in New York, a "monument to that spirit which is yours...and could have been mine," I feel the relief of redemption. There is a passage in which Roark does not know that something he has said has given a passing character "the courage to face a lifetime." Rand's hymn to integrity might achieve the same effect.

This, by the way, is the influence of longstanding efforts to encourage the teaching of The Fountainhead in high-school English courses, where it reaches students before their ideological commitments have hardened and raised their defenses against new ideas. I couldn't find any definitive biographical information on Steorts, but in a comment on a Democratic blog, he was referred to as a "very recent Harvard grad" in 2006—which puts him in just the right age range to have been influenced by this effort. And it does have the effect of softening up his view of Ayn Rand—both the value of her ideas and the value of her literature.

So why the enduring hostility? Atlas Shrugged, he complains, has a sense of cruelty and bitterness in its view of human nature because it focuses so much on its totally unsympathetic villains. Since TIA Daily goes to an audience mostly composed of Ayn Rand fans, I know that you are all now coming up with dozens of counter-examples to refute this obvious misrepresentation. The novel spends an enormous amount of time, even whole sections of the book—the extended flashback to Dagny's childhood, for example, or the scenes in Galt's Gulch—focusing exclusively on its heroes. But that's not the point. Steorts is not reacting to the actual composition of the novel, but to something else. The fact is that he doesn't notice all of the time spent on the heroes of the novel because he does not find them psychologically real and therefore regards them—brace yourselves for this—as uninteresting. He gives us an idea of this in his description of The Fountainhead, where he had the same problem.

In her introduction to its 25th-anniversary printing, she says: "This is the motive and purpose of my writing:
the projection of an ideal man
." Yet this man—the architect Howard Roark—turns out to be pretty boring. He rarely speaks. When he does, it is rarely interesting (and when it is, it is transparently didactic). He has no sense of humor. As his enemies try to destroy him, he shows so little emotion that the reader must rely upon an abstract sense of justice in order to give a damn. Howard Roark is a ghost of a protagonist.

Again, the counter-examples are flooding into your mind, but ask instead why Steorts ignores all of the evidence that runs counter to his conclusion. What we are seeing here is the influence of the sense of life of conservatism.

This article will be concluded in the next edition of TIA Daily.

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Ahh Ted!

Ya dirty dog, ya beat me to it!

lol

Adam

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Ahh Ted!

Ya dirty dog, ya beat me to it!

lol

Adam

Beat you to what? Identifying the National Review author as John David Stutts?

13654_512x288_manicured__gTe5XybiYUevS3j12yoUMQ.jpg

Ted:

Yes. The scary part is that there are two (2) reasonably intelligent folks who thought the same bizarre way. Must be being a New Yorker.

By the way has everyone who lives in the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circus, umm Circuit, checked out the undercarriages of there vehicles for planted GPSes? Apparently, in nine (9) states, you have no "reasonable expectancy of privacy" on the "private property" of your own driveway. I am using the archaic term "private property" for reference. http://caselaw.findl...it/1497005.html <<<< here is the decision - it is short and there was a dissent that is supposed to be powerful. I will post it when I find it.

Here is Chief Judge Kozinski's dissent. He is known as a libertarian and he pays particular attention to the individual's home's "curtilage", which is:

"Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces its roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner's property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools—so long as it's not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard—if it's not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house."

http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20100812145

Great video Ted.

Adam

Edited by Selene
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I'm no fan of the Chambers review, but aren't Rand and her followers the last people to object to a little hyperbole? What about all that stuff in Rand's books about people being death-worshippers and the like?

-Neil Parille

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So, "It's not just the 'gas chamber.' She piles offense upon offense, and they all come down to this: Instead of bringing forth the best within her, she brings forth the barely comprehensible hatred of her derangedly insecure ego."

Steorts is by no means the first person to be critical of the tunnel scene, or of other negative aspects of Rand's novels, and to place importance on them. During the past decade, I've even seen Objectivists cringing over such scenes.

But what do you think of it, Jerry? Do you believe that the people who died in the tunnel scene deserved what they got because they had the wrong beliefs? Don't you get a sense of Rand expressing something like hateful glee, or at least satisfaction, in the idea of them dying? Don't you see how people could reasonably interpret the scene as being a punishment fantasy which is lacking in proportion, and that such lack of proportion suggests irrationality?

In fact, he says nothing at all about the actions and intentions of these villains, apparently more upset about how Rand describes their physical appearance. He does not describe in what manner that they don't measure-up to Toohey or Wynand.

Right, he's making aesthetic judgments. The actions and intentions of the villains have nothing to do with it. Their immorality is not what he's talking about, but the artistry (or lack of it) with which he thinks Rand portrayed them. Personally, I disagree with his opinions, but I can understand where he's coming from. Many other people in the past have felt the same way -- that some of Rand's characters can be somewhat cardboard, and that her message was more important to her than her artistry.

He does not describe or criticize the plot or the philosophical discussions in the novel.

I agree that it's unfortunate that Steorts got so little out of the novel, but then again, I've seen Objectivists -- including Rand -- do the same thing with art that they didn't like. They see one minor aspect which they dislike, and they can't get beyond it. It often becomes the work's defining characteristic to them. Rand herself asserted that anything which is included in a work of art takes on metaphysical significance, and that the inclusion of a minor blemish is a viciously obscene attack on all values. So if the inclusion of a mere cold sore or other minor disfigurement is said to reveal so much about how evil and hateful an artist is, then I think it should be acceptable to focus as much attention on the meaning of including a hateful punishment fantasy in Atlas Shrugged. What's sauce for the goose, and all that.

When it comes to Rand's art, why do some Objectivists ignore the uncomfortable aspects, pretend they don't exist, or otherwise avoid dealing with them?

Did you notice that Tracinski's article doesn't address the tunnel scene and the attitude that many readers pick up on from it, but that he instead points to sunnier moments in the book? Maybe Tracinski plans on addressing the tunnel issue in the promised conclusion of his article, but I find it strange that, with the prominence that Steorts gave to it, Tracinski made no mention of it in the first installment of his article. It suggests to me that even he sees the scene as indefensible, or that he needs time to devise a way of constructing his words carefully enough to make it sound a little less indefensible.

Of course, maybe that is asking too much. After all, he did not read the last half of the novel. How this passes as acceptable literary criticism is beyond me.

In Objectivist circles, one can expose oneself to much less than half of a work of art before criticizing it. In O'land, it is perfectly acceptable to attack art that Objectivists have determined, prior to seeing it, to be evil/bad/wrong.

As in many/most published criticisms of Rand, Steorts thinks he can get away with mischaracterizing what Rand says. To those who actually did read the novel, his arguments are specious, at best. And for those who will read the novel, and compare what they found to what its severe critics have written about it, it is more likely that they will fault those critics rather than Rand.

Is any criticism of Rand acceptable? Is the idea here that Rand's art is "objectively superior," and anyone who disagrees is dishonest, has an agenda, and is "smearing" her?

J

Edited by Jonathan
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For what it's worth, Tracinski did indeed take up the tunnel scene in part 2 of his article. One more reason why all of you out there in OL-land ought to subscribe.

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Yep..he sure did.

There They Go Again

Part 2: Reading with Eyes Wide Shut

by Robert Tracinski

This article is continued from yesterday's edition of TIA Daily.

Steorts is not reacting to the actual composition of Atlas Shrugged, but to something else. The fact is that he doesn't notice all of the time spent on the heroes of the novel because he does not find them psychologically real and therefore regards them—brace yourselves for this—as uninteresting....

What we are seeing here is the influence of the sense of life of conservatism: he is only interested in characters who are imperfect, torn, conflicted. The two characters who "come to life" for him in The Fountainhead are those who represent a "passionate but thwarted idealism. Each is gripped by his conception of the beautiful and the good, but each betrays it without cease, and ironically out of loyalty to it."

In religious terms, conservatives hold a vision of man as "fallen," as inherently corrupted by original sin. The corollary, in psychological terms, is a view of man as inherently flawed, tortured by contradictions which prevent him from reaching the ideal. So a man who does reach the ideal, a man without inner psychological turmoil, is necessarily unrealistic, two-dimensional, uninteresting.

The altruism of the conservatives is also a motive here. In describing Ayn Rand as having a cruel and arrogant approach to the world, he cites her unwillingness to acknowledge the supposed "good intentions" that drive the statists' mad scramble for greater coercive power.

There is no room at all in
Atlas Shrugged
for the idea that its policymakers are acting on good-hearted but misguided principles. They are parasites, plain and simple, aware of their evil even if they take pains to hide it from themselves (this in fact confirms their awareness), which is why Rand is happy to hurl them all—if I may quote Chambers a final time—into "one undifferentiated damnation."

But the policies of the economic dictators in Atlas Shrugged—and they're not just standard-issue, old-fashioned "liberals"; they're dictators—are only "good-hearted" if one accepts sacrifice as the good, which is what the whole novel argues against.

And then, as a final motive, there is a religious conception of morality. This is why Steorts, like Chambers, is so put off by the Taggart Tunnel disaster that occurs about two-thirds of the way through the novel. He accurately describes the set-up.

A train is carrying 300 passengers through the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco....
The world scarcely has diesel locomotives. When the one attached to that train breaks down, the only replacements are coal-burning, which is a problem, because the train is about to pass through an eight-mile tunnel that is not properly ventilated for locomotives of this type. It happens that an important looter—Rand's term for the half-wits running and ruining the country—is on the train and has strong feelings about getting to San Francisco. His name is Kip Chalmers. "It's not
my
problem to figure out how you get the train through the tunnel, that's for
you
to figure out!" Kip Chalmers screams at a station agent. "But if you don't get me an engine and don't start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!"

This is persuasive. "The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power—the power of life or death." And so the station officials, knowing that the loss of their jobs means the loss of their lives, call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation.

What offends Steorts is the scene just before the train enters the tunnel, as the novel's narration goes cabin-to-cabin, describing how each of the passengers of the train advocated or supported, in some way, the political system that is about to kill them.

This offends Steorts because he see Ayn Rand, as the author of this scene, as being in the role of God—he actually uses that description—and therefore as arbitrarily condemning this train full of sinners to damnation. But this is not Ayn Rand's moral outlook. To understand the tunnel scene, you have to understand an exchange from earlier in the novel. Before Francisco D'Anconia's speech on the meaning of money, a woman at a party asks him a question. Here is the exchange:

"Senor D'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"
"Just exactly what it deserves."

"Oh, how cruel!"

"Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, Madam?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do."

This, by the way, is why the constant insistence that Ayn Rand is a bad writer falls so flat. This is a brilliant piece of dialogue on many different levels. It shows Francisco's skill at the quip and the one-liner. And notice the subtle point about this woman's unspoken assumption: that if the world is going to get what it deserves, it must deserve something bad. The exchange serves to deepen the mystery of Francisco's character: if he is worthless, skirt-chasing playboy, then why is he speaking "gravely" about morality? And beneath all of this, there is a profound point unique to Ayn Rand's philosophy: her conception of moral law.

Moral law, in Ayn Rand's philosophy, is natural law: it is the logical, long-term consequences of one's ideas and actions on one's well-being and survival. The moral law is not someone's arbitrary invention. It is not a code imposed from above by some supernatural being, who is personally in charge of meting out rewards and punishment according to his preferences. Instead, moral law is as inevitable as the laws of physics. It is the law of cause and effect applied to human action.

So when the passengers of the train ride off to their doom, there is in fact no "glee" in the presentation. Ayn Rand's voice as a narrator is always factual and impersonal. And the part of this scene that Steorts finds most objectionable for its insensitivity is actually painfully poignant:

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, "I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children."

That's the kind of heart-wrenching scene Ayn Rand is so good at writing. She shows us the mother's solicitous care for her children—and how it is undone by her unprincipled support for an evil system. This is not a punishment arbitrarily handed down out of some sense of revenge. Instead, the purpose of this scene is to demonstrate to us "the operation of the moral law," that the evil you advocate or sanction will come back to destroy you. And the purpose of that particular part of the scene is not to spare us from knowledge of the full destructiveness of evil, or the ruthlessness with which it is punished by reality.

But it is reality that does the punishing, by the inexorable logic of events. That's where Steorts gets it wrong. As the author, Ayn Rand is not in the role of God, but in the role of reality. And there is no way for reality to grant exceptions or show compassion. It just is what it is, and there is no one who can bargain or intercede—which is another central point of the novel.

Steorts's interpretation is a natural one if one implicitly views morality as a religious code, in which a deity imposes arbitrary rules that we can't live by. That's why forgiveness, the idea that we will somehow be spared from the consequences of our actions, is so important to religion. If the code can't be followed, if the ideal can't be reached, if we are all sinners—then we need a God (or an author) who grants exceptions out of compassion. That's why Steorts is so fascinated with Wynand: he is the conflicted sinner who can't reach the ideal, who falls short and need to seek redemption. He is the Ayn Rand hero that someone with a religious outlook on morality can identify with.

What is interesting is that all of these assumptions are expressed only on the sense-of-life level; they are not made explicit or really argued for. Thus, Steorts says that he finds Ayn Rand's "evangelistic atheism off-putting in the extreme," which would seem to be a central point—yet the remark is made in passing and he offers no argument against atheism. Combine that with his rejection of all of the central arguments made by Whittaker Chambers, and it becomes clear what is really happening here. The substantive intellectual resistance to Ayn Rand's ideas is melting away—but what is left is a stubborn sense-of-life resistance. The conservatives at National Review can't refute Ayn Rand's ideas, but they can't bring themselves to accept her, either.

This reminded me of an article published a few years back by another conservative associated with National Review, though in this case he was writing in the late, lamented New York Sun. Amid something like a thousand words of wall-to-wall sneering and innuendo, Andrew Stuttaford had only this to say about Ayn Rand's actual ideas:

Her creed of ego and laissez-faire, and the reception it won, was one of the more interesting—and encouraging—cultural phenomena of mid-20th-century America....
Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case....

[H]er books...played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

For all of his dishonesty, Whittaker Chambers at least had a central philosophical argument. That's gone, and today's conservatives largely acknowledge that Ayn Rand has been proven right about many things. But they can't bring themselves to depart from a conventional ethics or sense of life—so they pile up the smutty references to her personal life and parrot the fashionable ridicule of her writing style, in an attempt to justify not taking her ideas seriously.

In the article by Steorts, the most telling passage is one on the meaning of the word "ego" in describing Ayn Rand's self-sufficient hero Howard Roark.

Roark is egoless. I realize that's a dirty word in
The Fountainhead
, but I'm using it in a special sense, one I think Rand could accept. For Rand, "egoless" means self-negating, sacrificing yourself to something or someone else. What I will use it to mean is an absence of self-consciousness about your ego—a self-esteem secure enough that you don't compare yourself with others, a focus on your work complete enough that you don't worry whether it will succeed, a general freedom from thinking of your identity abstractly and trying to justify or glorify it.

So Ayn Rand made a profound point about the real meaning of the self, a point that is revolutionary in philosophy and central to the theme of The Fountainhead—yet Steorts just lets this new idea bounce off of him and casually returns to the conventional usage (or misuse) of the concept.

The overall sense is of someone who reads Ayn Rand's novels with eyes wide shut, missing 90 percent of the characterization, the conflict, the drama, the ideas. Call it Mr. Magoo epistemology.

The thinking habit behind this is: stick to the safe, the comfortable, the conventional, and be wary of challenging new ideas. This is why Ayn Rand's conservative critics always dismiss the earnest idealism of her novels as an appeal to the "adolescent," the idea being that when you grow up, you will give up, stop trying to answer the big questions of life for yourself, and just accept the conventional answers that have been provided to you.

Thus the bottom line, according to Steorts, is this: "Atlas Shrugged's power as an anthem against President Obama's agenda seems to me to be highly limited, and I think those of us who oppose that agenda would be unwise to push it as our manifesto." This is a call for moral and intellectual disarmament, at the worst possible time—and all to save a certain faction of conservatives from having to confront their own self-imposed blindness.

That's the worst part about the renewed conservative attacks on Ayn Rand. The last time they made a similar effort was around 2005, on the occasion of the centenary of Ayn Rand's birth, a time when we now know the groundwork was being laid for the financial crisis. It was a time when the case for free markets and capitalism—particularly the moral case—was being ignored by the right as well as the left. In short, it was a time when Ayn Rand's influence was desperately needed to save us from disaster, and these conservatives kept telling us to move along, that there was nothing to see here.

I don't think they can do it any more. Perhaps they could blunt Ayn Rand's influence when more of their readers were exposed only to articles like those by Chambers and Stuttaford—but not when so many of them are now reading Ayn Rand directly and drawing their own conclusions about the value of her work. I think that the National Review's desperate rear-guard action to defuse the impact of Ayn Rand's ideas will be futile—as it should be.

It is futile, because the logic of events is causing Americans to realize that they do need Ayn Rand's ideas—and they definitely need the projection, in literature, of her heroes' uncompromising determination to fight for their liberty.

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Yep..he sure did.

There They Go Again

Part 2: Reading with Eyes Wide Shut

by Robert Tracinski

This article is continued from yesterday's edition of TIA Daily.

...This is not a punishment arbitrarily handed down out of some sense of revenge. Instead, the purpose of this scene is to demonstrate to us "the operation of the moral law," that the evil you advocate or sanction will come back to destroy you. And the purpose of that particular part of the scene is not to spare us from knowledge of the full destructiveness of evil, or the ruthlessness with which it is punished by reality...

But it is reality that does the punishing, by the inexorable logic of events. That's where Steorts gets it wrong. As the author, Ayn Rand is not in the role of God, but in the role of reality. And there is no way for reality to grant exceptions or show compassion. It just is what it is, and there is no one who can bargain or intercede—which is another central point of the novel.

Let's take a closer look at one of the people who pissed off "reality" with his attitude:

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

Is that the way that "reality" talks? Is it an example of what Tracinski imagines to be Ayn Rand's voice as a narrator always being "factual and impersonal"? It sounds very personal to me.

What if this playwright's life experiences have been that every businessman he has met has indeed been a scoundrel? I mean, look at the inhabitants of the dark world of Atlas Shrugged. Most of the people are grubby little scoundrels. Isn't there even a scene where one of the golden businessmen (maybe Ellis Wyatt?) barks at Dagny because he assumes that she's probably just like her brother and every other incompetent scoundrel he's had to deal with? Okay, so what if the "snivelling little neurotic" had the same sort of experiences, and hadn't yet had the opportunity to witness a Hank or a Dagny behaving like non-scoundrels? What's he supposed to do, write plays in which businessmen are not scoundrels, and if he doesn't, then he deserves to die?

If that's the expectation that "reality" and "the operation of the moral law" would impose, then shouldn't Rand also be judged as "sniveling" and "cowardly" (and as deserving of death by asphyxiation) for presenting all politicians as scoundrels? Why didn't she rise above the vicious world that she had experienced, and create novels in which politicians were virtuous?

J

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Yep..he sure did.

There They Go Again

Part 2: Reading with Eyes Wide Shut

by Robert Tracinski

This article is continued from yesterday's edition of TIA Daily.

...This is not a punishment arbitrarily handed down out of some sense of revenge. Instead, the purpose of this scene is to demonstrate to us "the operation of the moral law," that the evil you advocate or sanction will come back to destroy you. And the purpose of that particular part of the scene is not to spare us from knowledge of the full destructiveness of evil, or the ruthlessness with which it is punished by reality...

But it is reality that does the punishing, by the inexorable logic of events. That's where Steorts gets it wrong. As the author, Ayn Rand is not in the role of God, but in the role of reality. And there is no way for reality to grant exceptions or show compassion. It just is what it is, and there is no one who can bargain or intercede—which is another central point of the novel.

Let's take a closer look at one of the people who pissed off "reality" with his attitude:

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.

Is that the way that "reality" talks? Is it an example of what Tracinski imagines to be Ayn Rand's voice as a narrator always being "factual and impersonal"? It sounds very personal to me.

What if this playwright's life experiences have been that every businessman he has met has indeed been a scoundrel? I mean, look at the inhabitants of the dark world of Atlas Shrugged. Most of the people are grubby little scoundrels. Isn't there even a scene where one of the golden businessmen (maybe Ellis Wyatt?) barks at Dagny because he assumes that she's probably just like her brother and every other incompetent scoundrel he's had to deal with? Okay, so what if the "snivelling little neurotic" had the same sort of experiences, and hadn't yet had the opportunity to witness a Hank or a Dagny behaving like non-scoundrels? What's he supposed to do, write plays in which businessmen are not scoundrels, and if he doesn't, then he deserves to die?

If that's the expectation that "reality" and "the operation of the moral law" would impose, then shouldn't Rand also be judged as "sniveling" and "cowardly" (and as deserving of death by asphyxiation) for presenting all politicians as scoundrels? Why didn't she rise above the vicious world that she had experienced, and create novels in which politicians were virtuous?

J

Jonathan,

Because she already saw a history where politicians were mostly virtuous: America's Founding Fathers. She wanted to create a world where the businessmen of the 19th and 20th century reclaimed their moral birthright. The theme of politician as hero is a hoary societal cliche. Businessmen as heroes was refreshing, new and the world as it might be and ought to be.

Jim

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Tracinski's point was rather weak in the second installment. Defending Rand here is difficult unless one emphasizes that this is a work of fiction and just a story. Rand likes gimmicks and this is a gimmick. Tracinski's naturalism defense is bizarre, identifying Rand as author not with a selective God but with a naturalistic mirror. Not everything is defensible and Rand need not be defended at the price of turning her into Emile Zola.

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I am no fan of Maggie Gallagher, but here she both defends Rand against Steorts and Chambers, and asks the same question I always have: "It has never been quite clear to me why in Rand’s world the most desirable men don’t sleep with other achieving men (even though Rand would be appalled by the idea)."

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Steorts has written a second, online-only piece where he discusses the Whittaker Chambers review at greater length.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244497/ayn-rand-and-whittaker-chambers-jason-lee-steorts

I would go so far as to say that Rand, given the chance, might well have been a totalitarian. More: She might have felt — as Chambers puts it — that “right reason itself” enjoined her tyranny.

Yeah, sure. Growing up in Soviet Russia she never had a chance to become Comrade Sonia. duh.gif

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Steorts has written a second, online-only piece where he discusses the Whittaker Chambers review at greater length.

http://www.nationalr...son-lee-steorts

I would go so far as to say that Rand, given the chance, might well have been a totalitarian. More: She might have felt — as Chambers puts it — that "right reason itself" enjoined her tyranny.

Yeah, sure. Growing up in Soviet Russia she never had a chance to become Comrade Sonia. duh.gif

This is the sort of puerile nonsense that any serious intellectual could have debunked with five minutes of research at the Ayn Rand Lexicon which is free online, for God's sake.

Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.

Oh, but wait, he stopped reading before he got to that point.

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Tracinksi writes:

Steorts's interpretation is a natural one if one implicitly views morality as a religious code, in which a deity imposes arbitrary rules that we can't live by. That's why forgiveness, the idea that we will somehow be spared from the consequences of our actions, is so important to religion. If the code can't be followed, if the ideal can't be reached, if we are all sinners—then we need a God (or an author) who grants exceptions out of compassion.

It would be helpful if Tracinski told us what religion he is referring to. In the Judeo-Christian tradition God gives moral law for people's own good and thus they are not "arbitrary." God says don't commit adultery and don't steal, in part at least, because following these rules makes it a better place to live. Nor does anyone say the code can't be followed. Nor does God grant people "exceptions."

But I'm curious: Does Tracinski think Objectivism is flawed because Rand didn't live up to its teachings consistently. Is Tracinski morally perfect?

Actually, I find Rand very religious in the apocalyptic tone of her writing.

-Neil Parille

Edited by Neil Parille
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Tracinksi writes:

Steorts's interpretation is a natural one if one implicitly views morality as a religious code, in which a deity imposes arbitrary rules that we can't live by. That's why forgiveness, the idea that we will somehow be spared from the consequences of our actions, is so important to religion. If the code can't be followed, if the ideal can't be reached, if we are all sinners—then we need a God (or an author) who grants exceptions out of compassion.

It would be helpful if Tracinski told us what religion he is referring to. In the Judeo-Christian tradition God gives moral law for people's own good and thus they are not "arbitrary." God says don't commit adultery and don't steal, in part at least, because following these rules makes it a better place to live. Nor does anyone say the code can't be followed. Nor does God grant people "exceptions."

But I'm curious: Does Tracinski think Objectivism is flawed because Rand didn't live up to its teachings consistently. Is Tracinski morally perfect?

Actually, I find Rand very religious in the apocalyptic tone of her writing.

-Neil Parille

Not exactly.

Jewish theologians admit that many of the restrictions they are expected to follow are arbitrary, and that choosing to obey such commands is in itself virtuous.

Where do you get the idea that an Objectivist "lives up to" his morality? Morality is a tool for achieving happiness, not an externally imposed code. Yes, Rand did on occasion act as if morality were her will reified. But Rand's personal behavior is not Objectivism itself.

What do you mean by "morally perfect"? Virtue is a process, not a state. The notion of moral perfection is as silly as describing a butterfly mounted in a collection as a specimen of perfect health.

You find Rand religious in the apocalyptic tone of her writing? That's what's called judgment by non-essentials. You might as well describe Jamaican street vendors in New York as High Church Roman Catholics because they use and peddle incense.

Do you really think Rand's "apocalyptic tone" has more in common with, say, faith in the rapture, than with other atheistic science fiction writers?

Tendentious criticisms of Rand based on partial readings and non-essentials reveal much more about their authors' motives than anything else.

Honest and effective criticisms of Rand need to be based on a full reading and a faithful exegesis.

You cannot claim to have refuted an argument which you have not stated at its strongest.

Edited by Ted Keer
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