I recently watched the movie version of The Fountainhead. And I think I can now say, with perfect confidence, that Ayn Rand can bite me.
Prior to this, I knew effectively nothing about Ms. Rand. I had never read any of her work, had never had any conversations about her that went beyond "You should read such-and-such." Never looked her up in an encyclopedia, never read any articles about her, never watched Biography Channel programs about her, never ran across anything about Objectivism in any works on philosophy. I had a vague sense that her work was controversial, and that was absolutely it.
So I really truly did come to The Fountainhead with an open mind. Ten minutes later...
Apparently, the history of the movie is this: the novel was very popular, so Ms. Rand was hired to write the script, and she demanded that there be no interference whatsoever with what she wrote. (Exactly the sorts of demands Howard Roark makes repeatedly.) When the director, King Vidor, trying his level best to make a movie, tried to tighten up that nearly six-minute speech she'd written for the end, Rand threw a fit, went to the head of the studio, demanded that Vidor film only and exactly what she had written, word for word, and got her way.
The result is awful. It's a bad, bad, bad movie, entirely because of the script. (I will submit that Gary Cooper's particularly wooden performance had a lot to do with his dislike of the script.) Leaving aside for the moment the philosophy espoused in the film, my initial adverse reaction was purely as a writer responding to the writing. And bear in mind, I'm not complaining because the film is preachy and didactic--I'm a huge fan of Bernard Shaw, and no one can ever say that Shaw wasn't preachy and didactic (the plot of Man and Superman is interrupted for about an hour by a speechfest called "Don Juan in Hell"). But Shaw had a sense of humor, and Rand doesn't at all. This makes a huge difference. Shaw was also a much better writer of dialogue, which is partly a function of his sense of humor, but it goes deeper than that--writing dialogue is a specialized skill, and clearly, Shaw had mastered it and Rand hadn't.
To be fair, I've still never read any of Rand's prose, and it may be that she was a good novelist but a bad screenwriter. I'm completely happy to accept, for the moment, that this is true, and to move on.
But here's the thing: the whole philosophy espoused by the movie is that the individual artist must never be interfered with in any way, that only the pure, untrampled creations of such artists can ever advance art and society. And this movie? It's a bad movie. By being left alone to create exactly what she wanted, without interference, Ayn Rand wrote a bad movie. The work itself completely undermines the very idea it seeks to advance.
Probably the reason why my dad has from time to time suggested I read Ms. Rand's work is because I seem to share her affinity for the supremacy of the artist. I am, after all, the writer of Thereby Hangs a Tale, which is a challenging novel written very much according to its own dictates, and resolutely not a casual beach-read. But at the same time, I'm also a former actor, and one thing I learned very clearly in my days on the stage is that the work isn't for the performer, it's for the audience. A bad actor is one who is only interested in exploring his own psyche onstage, which is that peculiar form of Narcissism that insists that the rest of the world watch the actor love himself.
Ms. Rand's architect, Howard Roark, continually insists that his buildings be constructed as designed, and he refuses to ever consider any other points of view about what's in his designs. (The movie stacks the argument ridiculously: opposing points of view are never balanced or thoughtful, they are only deadly literal recitations like this one: "You can't hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. Now, watch me! In just a few short years I'll shoot to the top of the architectural profession because I'm going to give the public what it wants.") Since his opponents are all manifest idiots, there's never any real Socratic dialogue, never any attempt to play one idea against another in order to arrive at a new truth--art here is an excuse for a predetermined ideological position, which is exactly why it fails as art--and, again, undermines Rand's own purpose. Roark is that bad actor, just as Rand is--they're not actually interested in the art for its own sake, they're only interested in their own self-aggrandizing freedom of expression at all costs.
To be Buddhist about it, the thing that is most missing from Rand's work is any sense of humility. A humble artist can still insist on the importance of following his own muse without allowing it to be watered down, but the key to that is to let the work itself lead where it must, without imposing preconditions on it--without insisting that the art support your philosophy of Objectivism, for example.
Again, we come to Shaw. You might well ask, isn't that exactly what Shaw's plays did? Weren't they often just excuses for him to espouse Socialism, or some other pet theory he had? In rebuttal, I will only offer Saint Joan. The reason why it's his best play, I've often thought, is because Joan surprised Shaw--that he originally wanted to write the play for didactic reasons, but as he went along the work started to take him to different places, places that surprised him. The character came alive, and he was a great enough artist to let that happen, to let the work lead him where it would, and didn't try to wrest control of it back to his ideological purpose. That is what makes great art--being humble enough to let the universe speak to you, to accept that you are not superman, that you don't know everything, and that sometimes the work is best when you just get the hell out of its way.
Plus, there's nothing at all wrong with finding some smart people whose opinions you respect and asking them what they think of the work you've made. Thereby is definitely a better work because I sought, and respected, and incorporated, the opinions of some very smart people.
There's more. I've now read up on Ms. Rand, and Objectivism. I can certainly see why someone who was a child in St. Petersburg during the 1917 revolution would come to hate any form of collectivism, and I certainly feel some empathy for how she came to reach that conclusion. But I can also see that she swung so far in the other direction that Objectivism became one short step away from Fascism, and it now comes as no surprise to discover that proponents of laissez-faire capitalism (Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, etc.) are huge fans of Ayn Rand. Her work often appeals to just the sort of person who has no humility, who believes himself to be a superman who must never be interfered with, who feels no need to "cater to the stinking masses." Her work becomes, in essence, one of the excuses they use to convince themselves that their own personal Fascism is perfectly okay, that they best serve society by ignoring society. And that's just plain wrong. There's a balance to be struck, and it's a difficult balance to be sure--but without the essential thing, without a little humility, listening to Ayn Rand will only lead you way down a dark, dark road.
Or, to say it again: Ayn Rand can bite me.
5 comments:
Or, to say it again: Ayn Rand can bite me.
Your ignorance of Objectivism is exceeded only by the intellectual impotence of the above 'juvenalia'. My eyelids grow heavy at the thought of plodding through the whole entry point by point, so I will settle for the false assumption closest to this end of it.
With your self-confessed humility, you have bowed to the conventional one-dimensional view of politics that left v. right is the only political axis alive, and that if one is not communist, left wing, liberal, or democrat, one must necessarily be republican, conservative, right wing or fascist.
But the alternative the left and right represent is not fundamental. The more fundamental alternative is that between freedom absent physical force and physical force absent freedom. The axis of political positions in the context of that alternative are arranged vertically from Rand's advocacy of unadulterated liberty at the top to Pol Pot's unadulterated tyranny at the bottom. All positions between them resort to initiated physical force to one degree or another to achieve their ends. Those to the left coerce men by regulating and/or confiscating their material values and actions. Those to the right coerce men by regulating or prohibiting their spiritual values and actions.
Human beings, however, survive and thrive not by mind or matter alone, but by an integrated interaction of the two. Therefore, one needs to control only one aspect completely to enslave. Consequently, the more a left government and a right government resort to coercion the less significant is their difference. That is why there was no discernible distinction between life under Hitler and life under Stalin.
The central principle of Rand's politics is:
No person shall initiate the use of physical force to
gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible
value created by or acquired in a voluntary exchange by any other person.
Per this principle, we who adhere to her philosophy advocate a politics that guarantees abortion and gay marriage as a right, prohibits any reference or relationship to any religion by the government, opposes regulation of drugs of any kind, protects pornography under the right to freedom of speech and self expression and may not coerce anyone to pay taxes for a war they do not support -- among countless other freedoms.
And your assertion is that Objectivism is "one short step away from Fascism"? On what do you base that?
Well that was fast.
It's late, so just a couple things.
My eyelids grow heavy at the thought of plodding through the whole entry point by point...
Which is of course how people conveniently skip the arguments they're not prepared to deal with. (In this case, skipping the overwhelming majority of my blog entry and its essential point, that Ms. Rand's bad work of art undermined the point she was trying to make with that bad work of art.)
The axis (sic) of political positions in the context of that alternative are arranged vertically from Rand's advocacy of unadulterated liberty at the top to Pol Pot's unadulterated tyranny at the bottom...
Okay, if you want to get geometric about political points of view, fine. I would suggest that the reorientation of the political axis you describe is merely that: a reorientation. Straight up and down, or straight across, it's still a flat two-dimensional perspective. My own view is actually circular: that when you go as far left as Stalin did, or as far right as Hitler did, you end up in the same place, which is despotism--extreme opposing viewpoints that end up meeting again on the other side. Which is exactly what I meant when I suggested that Ms. Rand might have veered so far from her experience of the Russian Revolution that she ended up at its opposite extreme--namely, a similar tyranny with a different name.
...countless other freedoms...
Trust me--after experiencing South Florida after Hurricane Andrew, I've seen all too clearly what happens to some people when societal rules are taken away, when the social contract is abandoned in favor of untrammeled liberty. (Just one example: the chaos that ensued when the traffic lights stopped working for several days.) Too much freedom can be just as dangerous as too little. So I say again: there is a necessary balance, and for me, Ms. Rand's work gets nowhere near what I think is that essential balance.
I welcome any further (more polite) rebuttal.
No, wait, actually there's one more thing, and it's the only part of your response that I found actually offensive:
...your self-confessed humility...
Humility is not something to be confessed to. It is not a sin to be spoken of in whispers in the dark of night. It's something to be embraced and championed. (Although humbly, I hasten to add.)
There was of course no humility in my coarsely asserting that Ms. Rand could bite me, but you know. Gotta have a wow finish. Or at least a little bit of a sense of humor.
I'll try to address the different points in your rant individually:
1) You need to read Ayn Rand's writings before you try to criticize her philosophy, because it's painfully clear that you don't understand what you're talking about. Ayn Rand was not an anarchist. She believed that government should be limited to the protection of individual rights, but she considered that role vital to the preservation of liberty.
2) As for Communism vs Fascism, it doesn't matter whether you call them up and down, or right and left, both are forms of socialism. If you think of socialism as a broad category of political thought in which the individual is considered subordinate to society as a whole, then communism and fascism are two subspecies of that philosophy. Fascism arose out of the communist movement in the post-WWI period due to disaffection with the internationalism of communism. It is simply a nationalist form of socialism with government control of the means of production replacing outright government ownership in most (but not all) cases. The economic goals of fascism look very much like what we have today.
3) The notion that fascism is individualistic or capitalistic is as false as the claim that Greenspan oversaw some sort of laissez-faire revival in the US economy. Greenspan long ago traded in his capitalist credentials for a government job. At no time while he was head of the Federal Reserve did he point out that the Federal Reserve should be abolished and the US returned to a gold standard, which is what Ayn Rand actually advocated. He joined the mixed economy, milked it, and then tried to deflect the blame onto Ayn Rand's philosophy.
4) There is a very good reason why humility is not a virtue in Objectivist ethics: It has no value to an individual's life. It simply disarms him in the face of other people's attempts to control him, and treat him as a sacrificial animal. That is the purpose of humility, to make people good little sheep to be gobbled by wolves or sheared by shepherds. Objectivists do not wish to be sheep, nor do we wish to be wolves or shepherds. Those are the only categories that altruists have for people, though, so they assume that anyone who rejects humility must aspire to be a wolf or shepherd. The essence of altruism is captured by an Aztec human sacrifice: there's the victim on the altar, the high priest with the knife, and the masses at the foot of the temple waiting to devour the sacrifice. We do not wish to be any part of such a monstrous ritual, and for that we're called monsters.
Why is is that the Randiacs keep insisting on talking politics, when I was clearly more interested in Rand as artist? Are none of them willing to defend her standing as a writer of fiction? It was after all her chief medium for the expression of her ideas.
There is a very good reason why humility is not a virtue in Objectivist ethics: It has no value to an individual's life.
And this is where the Randiacs and I permanently part ways. I am nowhere near the Manichean eat-or-be-eaten sort of person that they insist I am, though I suspect that in attempting to describe others they really describe themselves...
Post a Comment