Friday, February 5, 2010

The views of Ayn Rand has long inspired Americans, especially during times of economic hardship.

Now referencing Anne Heller’s biography of Rand, Anthony Daniels offers a pretty scathing critique of Rand.

First, her outlook is almost entirely Russian, and reactionary to the Soviet system that she came from.

Although she wrote in English, and her two most famous books are American in subject matter and location, she remained deeply Russian in outlook and intellectual style to the end of her days. America could take Rand out of Russia, but not Russia out of Rand. Her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature—and nineteenth-century Russian literature at that.

She had a narrow and rather absolute view of the world, and is a hardened ideologue whom had little time for self-reflection, a trait perhaps similarly reflected in the outlook of her most ardent admirers.

Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do.

Her belief of rationalism over rationality, and her adherence to intellectual principle over humanity, is reflected in her personal relationships with others.  Will Wilkinson also raised his objection over this aspect of Randian egoism.

Rand believed all people to be possessed of equal rights, but she found relations of equality with others insupportable. Though she could be charming, it was not something she could keep up for long. She was deeply ungrateful to those who had helped her and many of her friendships ended in acrimony.

For Rand, there was no ambiguity in the world: if it is true that man has free will and is responsible for his conduct, it cannot also be that there is a condition such as dementia that robs a man of his capacity for choice. Hence her husband’s lapses were wilful and deliberate, to be corrected by Randian brainwashing. This is authentically horrible.  Read more...