Feb 3, 2005
Happy birthday, Ayn Rand
February 2 marks the 100th birthday of the last of the great triumvirate of writers--Isabel Paterson (1886-1961), Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), and Ayn Rand (1905-1982)--who are generally, and properly, regarded as the chief progenitors of American libertarianism.
Rand’s direct influence was by far the greatest of the three. Her novels and essays and television appearances appealed to a tremendous audience. It is not too much to say that she was the idol of millions, and remains so. Her ability to seize on important issues and express her reasoning about them with unexampled clarity and force led a generation of young libertarian intellectuals to discover that they were, in fact, intellectuals, by discovering that they were willing and able to argue with Rand.
On the eve of Rand’s hundredth anniversary, it occurs to me how likely, and unlikely, her achievement was.
How monumentally unlikely it seems that a woman who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, who was threatened with extinction by Bolsheviks, who fled to a nation whose language she could barely speak, who failed miserably during the first two decades of her attempt to establish herself as a writer, and who insisted on preaching ideas that twentieth-century culture had supposedly discarded--such bizarre notions as the usefulness and moral necessity of capitalism, the adequacy and objectivity of human reason, and the all-transcendent rights of the individual self--could ever have supported herself as a writer, let alone have achieved an immense and adoring popular audience.
Add to Rand’s heroic intellectual independence the other distinctive features of her personality: her stubbornness, her bad temper, her growing and eventually triumphant inability to tolerate criticism, her depression and agoraphobia, her unacknowledged puritanism, her very unevenly developed sense of humor, her narrow range of literary interests, her lack of common sense about friendship, politics, and even money, her startling naivete about many aspects of history, intellectual and otherwise, her complete ignorance about many aspects of human psychology, her remarkable ability to believe almost anything she wanted to about herself, then create a history to support her beliefs . . . How could someone with these traits--and with the shyness, ingenuousness, and fragile charm that Rand also had, and preserved--ever have made an impact on our culture? And the qualities I’ve just listed were not superficial, as I found when researching the part of my book, “The Woman and the Dynamo,” that has to do with Rand’s relationship to Paterson. The more you know about Ayn Rand, the more you see both the brilliant light and the eerie shade.
And yet, when one appreciates the degree to which Rand’s most important ideas really do approximate the truth, one begins to think that nothing was more likely than her success.
She believed that objective reason is humanity’s tool of survival. Other people, possessing that tool, found that they believed this also; they saw their belief confirmed in what she said, and engaged themselves with her philosophy. That was very natural.
She argued that the American system of individual rights allowed the best ideas to be heard and gave them a good opportunity to prevail in practice. That turned out to be true, notably in relationship to her own ideas. She believed in capitalism; and sure enough, the American capitalist system allowed her to succeed. It didn’t allow her to “change the culture” overnight, as she wished to do, and it didn’t cut her much slack; but it allowed her to find her audience. Again, very natural.
She believed that there is something heroic about the uncompromised and uncompromising self, and she was right about that as well. Because that heroic quality exists, and is hard to hide, other people eventually found it in the shape of her own life and thought. Another very natural result.
But whether Rand’s achievement was likely or unlikely, it was clearly important enough for other people to continue to think about and argue about and try to account for and assess, even now, a generation after Rand herself passed from the scene. It is important enough to celebrate, that’s for sure; and I have no doubt that on February 2, 2105, that will still be true.
Rand’s direct influence was by far the greatest of the three. Her novels and essays and television appearances appealed to a tremendous audience. It is not too much to say that she was the idol of millions, and remains so. Her ability to seize on important issues and express her reasoning about them with unexampled clarity and force led a generation of young libertarian intellectuals to discover that they were, in fact, intellectuals, by discovering that they were willing and able to argue with Rand.
On the eve of Rand’s hundredth anniversary, it occurs to me how likely, and unlikely, her achievement was.
How monumentally unlikely it seems that a woman who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, who was threatened with extinction by Bolsheviks, who fled to a nation whose language she could barely speak, who failed miserably during the first two decades of her attempt to establish herself as a writer, and who insisted on preaching ideas that twentieth-century culture had supposedly discarded--such bizarre notions as the usefulness and moral necessity of capitalism, the adequacy and objectivity of human reason, and the all-transcendent rights of the individual self--could ever have supported herself as a writer, let alone have achieved an immense and adoring popular audience.
Add to Rand’s heroic intellectual independence the other distinctive features of her personality: her stubbornness, her bad temper, her growing and eventually triumphant inability to tolerate criticism, her depression and agoraphobia, her unacknowledged puritanism, her very unevenly developed sense of humor, her narrow range of literary interests, her lack of common sense about friendship, politics, and even money, her startling naivete about many aspects of history, intellectual and otherwise, her complete ignorance about many aspects of human psychology, her remarkable ability to believe almost anything she wanted to about herself, then create a history to support her beliefs . . . How could someone with these traits--and with the shyness, ingenuousness, and fragile charm that Rand also had, and preserved--ever have made an impact on our culture? And the qualities I’ve just listed were not superficial, as I found when researching the part of my book, “The Woman and the Dynamo,” that has to do with Rand’s relationship to Paterson. The more you know about Ayn Rand, the more you see both the brilliant light and the eerie shade.
And yet, when one appreciates the degree to which Rand’s most important ideas really do approximate the truth, one begins to think that nothing was more likely than her success.
She believed that objective reason is humanity’s tool of survival. Other people, possessing that tool, found that they believed this also; they saw their belief confirmed in what she said, and engaged themselves with her philosophy. That was very natural.
She argued that the American system of individual rights allowed the best ideas to be heard and gave them a good opportunity to prevail in practice. That turned out to be true, notably in relationship to her own ideas. She believed in capitalism; and sure enough, the American capitalist system allowed her to succeed. It didn’t allow her to “change the culture” overnight, as she wished to do, and it didn’t cut her much slack; but it allowed her to find her audience. Again, very natural.
She believed that there is something heroic about the uncompromised and uncompromising self, and she was right about that as well. Because that heroic quality exists, and is hard to hide, other people eventually found it in the shape of her own life and thought. Another very natural result.
But whether Rand’s achievement was likely or unlikely, it was clearly important enough for other people to continue to think about and argue about and try to account for and assess, even now, a generation after Rand herself passed from the scene. It is important enough to celebrate, that’s for sure; and I have no doubt that on February 2, 2105, that will still be true.