Ayn Rand’s acolytes congratulate themselves for having found in their mentor the apotheosis of Western culture, the woman who was finally able to purify the Western tradition from the taint of theism, altruism and irrationality that had infected it for centuries. They are, like all of us, busy people, and thus are very glad of this discovery. It spares them the trouble of reading all these tainted books. The Ayn Rand acolytes, like those fundamentalist Christians who believe that all truth is to be found in the Bible, now have an excellent excuse to avoid reading other books. They can remain ignorant of the entire trajectory of Western culture without feeling guilty about it. Perhaps most tragically, their complacency deprives them of the very knowledge about Western culture that would allow them to assess the validity of the claim that Ayn Rand constitutes its culmination. Philistines seem to be very adept and finding rationalizations to justify their philistinism, and in this regard the Ayn Rand acolytes are no exception.
In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand condemns impostors who demand that they be recognized for “erudition without study, authority without cost, judgment without effort.” (p. 63) When I read this, I think of no one more than I think of her own followers, who pose as philosophers without having studied philosophy, as sociologists without having studied sociology, as economists without having studied economics.
In another ironic twist, the Ayn Rand acolytes do not even find it necessary, when they laud independent thought and creativity, to devise their own way of expressing these sentiments. They merely parrot the aphorisms of their mentor.
Some might find Ayn Rand’s strident condemnations of other writers to blame for the philistinism of her acolytes. I do not. There is nothing inherently blameworthy in exaggerating one’s differences with other thinkers and artists. This is what allows a writer to make these differences clearly visible. The fault lies rather in the credulousness of her readers, who uncritically accept her judgments about other writers without even taking the trouble to read them.
Ayn Rand did not get to be Ayn Rand by reading only the books that she agreed with. She read and carefully analyzed the opposing viewpoints too. They offered a challenge, an exercise in refutation skills. Wouldn't those who admire Ayn Rand want to choose books from her reading list, the books that led, via both positive and negative influences, to her becoming the writer they admire?
While many have lamented the baneful influence of Ayn Rand on her “inner circle” of followers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, most fail to consider the possibility that the followers may have corrupted the leader just as much as the leader corrupted the followers.
The integrity of Ayn Rand’s philosophical views and the quality of her writing, it seems to me, begin to degenerate after the 1950s, precisely the time in which she begins to interact with her admirers. This can be seen by contrasting The Fountainhead with Atlas Shrugged.
The Fountainhead displays a reflective attitude toward capitalism, recognizing that private property is a necessary requirement for the independent man to exist, yet also recognizing the potential for the independent man to be corrupted through commerce with secondhand men.
Just as democracy must be limited, because the majority does not always understand or respect the rights of men, so the man engaged in commerce must carefully limit the influence he allows potential trading partners, because the majority of these potential partners will not understand or respect the integrity of his work. If he fails to maintain such a limit, his integrity will inevitably suffer.
To put it another way, the individual who breaks free from the collective power of the state only to then submit to the collective power of “the market” is hardly worthy of being called an individual. The truly independent individual always steadfastly adheres to the course demanded by his own genius, irrespective of whether the state approves of it, whether the community approves of it, whether the market approves of it.
In Atlas Shrugged, this sort of reflective attitude toward capitalism is largely absent. By then Ayn Rand's writings on capitalism have for most part degenerated into simple-minded panegyric, blissfully if not willfully disregarding the influence of secondhand men in the market.
Those who read Ayn Rand’s books and take away from them nothing but her praise of commerce are, it seems to me, like the followers of Henry Cameron in The Fountainhead who are impressed by nothing but the economical aspect of his innovations. “The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.” (p. 473)
Those who read Ayn Rand’s books and take away nothing but her praise of political freedom resemble another group of Cameron’s followers—those for whom “the freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became mere elimination of all effort.” (pp. 473-474)
The fact that Ayn Rand devoted her later writing primarily to the commercial and libertarian aspects of her philosophical and artistic vision might perhaps result in part from the fact that these are the aspects in which her followers took the greatest interest. Her followers did not care so much for the vision of the uncompromising man faithful only to his own genius. But they were very fond of the vision of the commercial man faithful only to his own material interests. This was a much less demanding vision, much more comfortable. This, therefore, was the vision she chose to develop in her later work.
In the period between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the method by which Ayn Rand presents her philosophy has also degenerated.
Among the techniques The Fountainhead uses to criticize the philosophy of the secondhand man, one of the most effective is the speeches made by the secondhand men themselves (Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey). These speeches, by making the assumptions behind the secondhand man’s philosophy explicit, show just how corrupt and inhuman such a philosophy really is.
In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand speaks of “ponderous inanities ... uttered as a revelation and insolently demanding acceptance as such.” (p. 491) But in Atlas Shrugged, we find the former critic of such inanities uttering them herself. She never tires, for example, of repeating “A is A” and “existence exists.”
The sheer number of repetitions of such statements makes one suspect that perhaps Ayn Rand had begun after all to understand the mental capacity of her followers and to adjust her style of presentation accordingly. Perhaps she, like Gail Wynand’s teacher in The Fountainhead, had given up on trying to teach the best and the brightest and, devoting her attention to the slow and the dull, “repeated and chewed and rechewed, sweating to force some spark of intellect from vacant eyes.” (p. 403)
More importantly, however, the fact that Ayn Rand in her later years degenerated to the point where she could only respond to sophisticated arguments about the nature of reason and language with ponderous inanities like “A is A” and “existence exists” suggests that she was no longer taking the trouble to really understand opposing arguments. She coarsely grouped classes of philosophers together and classified them as evil and corrupt, without stopping to consider that perhaps, in some cases, some of their arguments may have been correct and some incorrect.
When I hear the later Ayn Rand condemn philosophers and whole schools of philosophy, branding them as “evil,” I think of Alvah Scarrett calling Howard Roark “a crank and a freak and a fool.” (p. 524) When Scarrett disparages Roark, it is only because he doesn't understand his work.
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