"Who is Ayn Rand?" by Charles Murray

[Barbara Branden]

Here is an important excerpt from a review of Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made, and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market. The review is entitled “Who is Ayn Rand?” and is written by Charles Murray.

Th excerpt I have chosen is especially interesting, thought provoking, and relevant in view of the McCloskey controversy and Robert Tracinski’s article, “Anthemgate, the Objectivist Movement Commits Suicide.”

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Who is Ayn Rand?

[by Charles Murray

. . . Why then has reading these biographies of a deeply flawed woman—putting it gently—made me want to go back and reread her novels yet again? The answer is that Rand was a hedgehog who got a few huge truths right, and expressed those truths in her fiction so powerfully that they continue to inspire each new generation. They have only a loose relationship with Objectivism as a philosophy (which was formally developed only after the novels were written). Are selfishness and greed cardinal virtues in Objectivism? Who cares? Does Objectivist aesthetics denigrate Bach and Mozart? Who cares? Objectivism has nothing to do with what mesmerizes people about The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. What does mesmerize us? Fans of Ayn Rand will answer differently. Part of the popularity of the books derives from the many ways their themes can be refracted. Here is what I saw in Rand's fictional world that shaped my views as an adolescent and still shapes them 50 years later.

First, Rand expressed the glory of human achievement. She tapped into the delight that a human being ought to feel at watching another member of our species doing things superbly well. The scenes in The Fountainhead in which the hero, Howard Roark, realizes his visions of architectural truth are brilliant evocations of human creativity at work. But I also loved scenes like the one in Atlas Shrugged when protagonist Dagny Taggart is in the cab of the locomotive on the first run on the John Galt line, going at record speed, and glances at the engineer:

He sat slumped forward a little, relaxed, one hand resting lightly on the throttle as if by chance; but his eyes were fixed on the track ahead. He had the ease of an expert, so confident that it seemed casual, but it was the ease of a tremendous concentration, the concentration on one's task that has the ruthlessness of an absolute.


That's a heroic vision of a blue-collar worker doing his job. There are many others. Critics often accuse Rand of portraying a few geniuses as the only people worth valuing. That's not what I took away from her. I saw her celebrating people who did their work well and condemning people who settled for less, in great endeavors or small; celebrating those who took responsibility for their lives, and condemning those who did not. That sounded right to me in 1960 and still sounds right in 2010.

Second, Ayn Rand portrayed a world I wanted to live in, not because I would be rich or powerful in it, but because it consisted of people I wanted to be around. As conditions deteriorate in Atlas Shrugged, the first person to quit in disgust at Hank Rearden's steel mill is Tom Colby, head of the company union:

For ten years, he had heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a "company union" and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict with the management. This was true; no conflict had ever been necessary; Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, for which he demanded—and got—the best labor force to be found anywhere.


That's not a world of selfishness or greed. It's a world of cooperation and mutual benefit through the pursuit of self-interest, enabling satisfying lives not only for the Hank Reardens of the world but for factory workers. I still want to live there.

That world came together in the chapters of Atlas Shrugged describing Galt's Gulch, the chapters I most often reread when I go back to the book. The great men and women who have gone on strike are gathered there, sometimes working at their old professions, but more often being grocers and cabbage growers and plumbers, because that's the niche in which they can make a living. In scene after scene, Rand shows what such a community would be like, and it does not consist of isolated individualists holding one another at arm's length. Individualists, yes, but ones who have fun in one another's company, care about one another, and care for one another—not out of obligation, but out of mutual respect and spontaneous affection.


* * *


Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I'm about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.

About the Author

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of such important books as Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, which discussed th disasters of he American welfare system; The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structrue in American Life; Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in h Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950; and the forthcoming Coming Apart at the Seams, about racism in America since Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Barbara

[BaalChatzaf]

Amen! Murray nailed it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Barbara,

Thank you for that excerpt. It gives a different (and better) voice to some of my own thoughts about Rand's true impact.

Here is the full article by Charles Murray for anyone interested:

Who is Ayn Rand? A review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller

Michael

[anthony]

Amen! Murray nailed it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

As a private, inspirational, statement, I very much agree.

Amidst all the fuss, it is not often enough that one is reminded of the essential spirit of Ayn Rand's work.

Outside of that, I can't really agree that her essays were any less inspiring than her novels. The applicability to reality and one's life in the fiction, and then the follow-up punch of her theoretical structure.

Further, musing on Charles Murray's fine sentiments, I also wonder if America can ever be detached from Objectivism, or Objectivism from America...

Of course it couldn't, and shouldn't - Rand wrote synonomously of both - but I do concern myself with O'ism's universal appeal at times.

Tony

[Selene]

Thank you Barbara Branden!

Excellent. Mr. Murray is an superior writer. The statement about the rigid discipline necessary to be competent, which looks effortless, is an extremely important illustration of Rand's brilliance. When Dagny goes into the diner and sees a "short order cook" expertly flipping hamburgers, she is calmed by his competency. Who is this competent short order cook, a philosophy professor! Skill is skill. Love and respect for competency is American.

The lens that Mr. Murray allows us to see the Gulch through is a metaphoric mirror which reflects so many towns and communities in this country that I have experienced. A small Pennsylvania town where I spent much of my youth because my parents had a place there as well as our home in NY City was just that way.

The owner operator of the "general store" had quit his job as the principal of a High School in Scranton because he could not run the school with the principle of excellence. I did not know it at eight (8) years old, but he was one of the first "strikers" that I ever met.

I would sit with others from the town and surrounding farms, around a literal pot belly stove, in the late 1950's, and discuss ideas from crops to communism. How to grow better crops and how to kill communism.

Rand, as Mr. Murray states, understood the power in man from which springs all that is good and valuable.

Thank you.

Adam

[Mikee]

I really like this. I've always liked Charles Murray and this is the best thing I've read in awhile about Ayn Rand. Thanks very much for posting this.

Mike Erickson

[Brant Gaede]

This goes to show the great value of a fresh perspective.

--Brant