Just Had to Mention...

...this new Facebook group. Plugging the Gulf Oil Leak With the Works of Ayn Rand. At last, a solution that cures two major problems!

Birth of a Demagogue

You may remember that I had some issues with Ayn Rand recently. My initial reaction, upon finally being exposed to some of her work, was to object vehemently, mostly on artistic grounds. I wrote a blog entry, posted it, and moved on to other things.

Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.

Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)

Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?

“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.

Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.

Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.

The result: crickets.

The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.

I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.

The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.

This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.

Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.

So.

Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.

Have a lovely day.

(Chowderheads.)

Metallic Randiacs Write Themselves

Now that that’s out of my system, time to change the subject. A lot. And frequently.

Slow Hand

Haven’t mentioned the guitar in a while, but there’s been progress. On the acoustic, I’m starting to manage picking songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” I’m even slowly writing a song that is called, so far, “Variations in C” because it mostly depends on my not having to move my hand from the basic C-chord position. But I’m also starting to hit barre chords with some consistency, which feels like a major hurdle. And on the bass, I’m doing a reasonable job on songs like Elvis Costello’s “Pump it Up,” which is fast and moves a lot. And I have to say that of all songs, who’d have thought I would find Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” to be so much damn fun?

Last night, though, it’s like it all went away. Both hands felt like lead. The left just seemed to lag as I tried the run at the beginning of the Nancy Sinatra song, I was just kinda staring at it and thinking “What the hell’s wrong with you?” And the right hand was similarly clumsy--the fingernails, which are not all that long, kept hitting the strings when I didn’t want them to, imparting a heavy metallic clanging sound that was just plain ugly.

Two explanations present themselves: (1) it was just one of those nights, it happens; and (2) in fact I’ve always been that bad, or worse, but at last I’ve developed my awareness enough to realize it.

I leave it to you to speculate which of those is true.

Ou est le Randiacs?

Come on, people! In previous blog entries where I barely mentioned Ayn Rand, her supporters would pop up almost instantly, telling me how intellectually jejeune I was, how I didn’t know what I was talking about and really should just shut up please. So okay, I took that as a welcome challenge and responded. Worked hard, wrote an essay I’m proud of, and with the exception of a comment from a friend of mine who already agreed with me, there’s been no response--particularly, none from the Objectivist crowd.

Can it be? Have I so completely proven my point that they’ve all just given up and given in? Fabulous! I expect to see a plunge in sales of Atlas Shrugged any day now...

Writing the Boards Again

The other day I was describing myself to someone, somewhere, and for the umpteenth time said I was “a person of the theatre.” It takes umpteen times for me to notice things, but I finally stopped and said “You know, that’s really kinda true.” A couple days later, I took a project I’ve been planning to write as a movie, and instead began writing a new play. First time I’ve done any playwriting in just about ten years.

It feels amazingly good. So much fun to stretch that particular set of writing muscles again, and to remind myself of how a stage play works, and why.

And so far? This thing is writing itself. The first thirty pages have been just about effortless, and I’m loving what has emerged to date. Even had that loveliest of moments, early on, when I put two characters on stage together, thinking I was going to write the scene one way--but as soon as they were together, they took over and the scene became a whole different thing that instantly deepened and enriched the play.

As with Thereby, I feel like I’m not the captain, I’m just a passenger on this ride. That makes me one seriously happy writer.

Ayn Rand, Part Two

I sometimes wonder whether Ayn Rand was being deliberately inflammatory when she chose “selfishness” as the lynchpin of her prescription for human behavior. It’s something we’re all taught not to be as children (when we are, of course, massively selfish), so to be told by an adult that in fact that’s just what we should be, it spins our heads around a little. Which was probably exactly what Rand wanted. Oliver Stone was, of course, trying to do exactly the same thing when he wrote Gordon Gekko’s infamous “Greed is good” speech in Wall Street, although in Stone’s case, he was laying out a position his main character would eventually abandon.

In defense of the orthodoxy, then, here I come to take on Ayn Rand. And let me begin, again, by agreeing with her on something:

To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims--by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know--is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

Clearly, then, when she advocates selfishness she is not advocating any kind of emotional selfishness where you childishly do whatever you feel like at any given moment. What she’s after is rational selfishness, where you reason out what’s best for you and then do that, boldly and without hesitation.

The trouble is, this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as socialism, in that both ignore certain inescapable facts about human nature. (And remember that Rand’s philosophy is at heart a violent reaction against socialism, born from her personal experiences with the Soviet revolution.) With socialism, people will always want to at least believe that one way or another, they’re a little bit better than their neighbor. True parity is impossible because no one would ever stand for it. Similarly, some of the people most likely to be attracted to Rand’s selfishness are, alas, also likely to ignore her distinction between emotional and rational selfishness, and decide that they’ve now got license to go ahead and do whatever they feel like at any given moment. Their actions become, to be sure, a distortion of what Rand was going for--but, perhaps because she chose a deliberately inflammatory word, Rand opens the door wide and lets absolutely everyone in, including all those who’ve been looking for an excuse to be emotionally selfish. Children, dressed as adults.

But it doesn’t stop there, because Rand doesn’t stop there.

To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

And in this manner, she attempts to abnegate the golden rule. Because if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, then there are no ethical standards at play, only individual whims, which is exactly what Rand means when she refers to “ethical hedonists.” But, speaking only for myself because I’m the only person I can speak for, my definition of how I’d like to be treated by others, and how I in turn strive to treat them, is not generally dictated by my sense of what’s pleasurable--it is in fact guided by my sense of values.

Have I just locked myself into a circular definition? In the first part of this critique I defined myself as a relative relativist, with only one absolute: the golden rule. Now I say that the test against which I measure the golden rule is my own set of values, even though, as a relativist, I would seem to have none. It’s exactly this sort of thing that drove Rand crazy...

When a “desire,” regardless of its nature or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”)--men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests will necessarily clash.

(Here, by the way, she is directly taking on the school of philosophers known as the Utilitarians. Bentham, Mill, etc. Utilitarianism, as it happens, is a branch of what’s called Consequentialism—and I can’t help wondering whether her Objectivism is really just a different branch of Consequentialism, thus explaining her particular ire for the Utilitarians. Academic in-fighting, basically. But that’s a topic for another day.)

“The greatest happiness for the greatest number” comes pretty close to describing what lies at the heart of my own ethos, so I guess you could call me a Utilitarian. But in her dismissal of this point of view, I think she misses the mark badly--men’s desires and interests will only clash when their desires and interests are exclusive, i.e., when my desires are not the same as yours, yours are not the same as mine, and we then resort to fisticuffs to try and force the question of whose desires will win the day. But by definition, my desires also take into account yours--you can’t have “the greatest good for the greatest number” without constant attention to what others desire, and how your own desires can be slotted into those of others.

My approach, then, is inclusive; Rand’s is exclusive. I can’t help thinking that if one truly followed her approach, s/he would end up at exactly at the place Rand decries above: in conflict with others whose definition of their own self-interest, their own selfishness, does not agree with yours. Since consideration of others’ self-interest is considered harmful, then your own self-interest is all that’s left, and without that consideration of those around you, surely conflict becomes more likely rather than less. The only way around this problem would be enforced conformity: everyone on earth agreeing to the same definition of individual self-interest. And that doesn’t sound at all like the sort of freedom Rand is reaching for; in fact, it sounds like exactly the opposite.

But here’s where, for a moment, I agree with Rand again:

... no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man--or group or society or government--has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This seems self-evidently right, and for all my differences with Rand elsewhere, here we are matched up perfectly. But then she just has to take it further:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

For one thing, she sneaks in a very sweeping declaration about property rights without further discussion of what she means (except to suggest that people go and read Atlas Shrugged). And since property rights more or less sit at the heart of every economic theory ever devised, then this particular question is of crucial importance. Not the sort of thing to be glossed over so casually.

Now on its face, the above statement about the purpose of government seems unassailable. But in short order, its ramifications are made clear:

When I say “capitalism,” I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism--with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.

Well, I might submit that during the Eighties and Nineties, we came relatively close to uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, and the result was disastrous. Rand, however, would probably respond that it was government’s interference in open markets that produced the abuses we have all seen. Her vision of capitalism is, after all, every bit as black-and-white as her vision of everything else is: pure unfettered capitalism, utterly unregulated, or nothing. If no other rights are possible without property rights, then it must follow that property rights must be defended fiercely above all else.

I tend to feel about capitalism the same way Churchill felt about democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Rand, however, has clearly settled on capitalism as the be-all and end-all. But the trouble with any system that overtly appeals to man’s greed is that greed is a bottomless pit. You can never have enough of whatever you covet, as Charles MacKay demonstrates amply in the first chapter of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. (In which he discusses financial bubbles--remember please that he wrote it over 160 years ago, and we haven’t learned a thing since.)

Given the evidence before us with the current recession, I am more firmly convinced than ever that Rand is just plain wrong about the need for unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. What’s needed instead is managed capitalism, because otherwise you simply cannot check the greed of those who will, every time without fail, take advantage of unregulated markets to satisfy their bottomless greed. Rand might reply that the people who exploit markets and people for their own gain are simply criminals who deserve punishment, that even if they claim to be devoted Ayn Rand followers they are really just thugs taking advantage of what would otherwise be a perfectly good system.

Again, I say that this view is naïve. You simply cannot create a system that appeals to man’s greed and then tell him not to get too greedy. It won’t work. Without some mechanism that understands this, and sets limits, you will experience systemic crashes just like the one we’re suffering through now. Every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Are they criminals? Of course they’re criminals, and they deserve to be treated as such. But if markets are unregulated, how do you prosecute these people? The perpetrators of credit default swaps and all the other nonsense we’re suffering through now were behaving in a perfectly legal manner, in an unregulated sphere of the marketplace, and they came horrifyingly close to ruining the nation. (And may still --it ain’t over yet.) That is the result of Ayn Rand’s views about capitalism, which are the perfect end result of her entire Objectivist philosophy.

People have been buying Rand’s books by the thousands since the recession began. Yaron Brook, who runs the Ayn Rand Institute, recently said of this phenomenon,

As America faces a devastating economic crisis fundamentally caused by government policies, it is a hopeful sign for the future that increasing numbers of concerned Americans are turning to Atlas Shrugged and discovering Ayn Rand’s original morality of rational egoism and her uncompromising defense of laissez faire capitalism.

He’s got it completely backward. But if all these sales of her books somehow result in a groundswell movement where people actually try to implement Rand’s thinking on a national scale, well, to resort to a divinity she ridiculed, God help us.

Ayn Rand, Part One

At last, by popular non-demand, I present my critique of the ethos of Ayn Rand. All ye with Google Alerts, prepare to be offended. (‘Cause after all, no matter how reasonable I am, somebody’s gonna take offense...)

And please bear in mind that this is a blog entry, not a full-on essay. While I have in fact written point-by-point notes in refutation of (or agreement with) Rand’s various assertions, in this forum I’m only going to deal in broad strokes.

Let’s start with this: there is, in fact, a massive point of agreement between Ms. Rand and myself. In a presentation she delivered to the University of Wisconsin’s “Ethics in Our Time” symposium in 1961, Ms. Rand said:

“That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose--the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being--belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to lead is his own.

This is, in Rand’s words, a nearly perfect analogue to a principle I have often expressed (it is in fact the principal idea underlying just about everything I’ve ever written), which, in my own words, is that our lives are stories we are telling to ourselves, and that only we can tell our own stories--but that we must also resist the efforts of others to tell our stories for us. (Parents, bosses, governments, etc., it goes on all the time.)

What she and I both say, to put it yet another way, is that the responsibility for living our lives is only our own, and that when we simply follow the herd, or do what the herd tells us to do, very often we end up losing many of the things that are, or should be, most important to us.

If I agree with her on this important point, then why do I still, in general, disagree so strenuously with the Objectivist ethos? It all turns on two ideas: sacrifice and selfishness. First up, sacrifice.

As I have noted before, I believe I understand why she responded to any notion of individual sacrifice to a collective as vehemently as she did: she was born in Russia in 1905, watched the 1917 revolution unfold beneath the windows of her home in St. Petersburg, and had to endure the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy by the new Soviet government. The family fled to the Crimea, were nearly killed by bandits along the way, and when her father opened a new pharmacy in the Crimea, that too was confiscated. She escaped to the U.S. after college and vowed never to return. So obviously, she went through a long series of horrific experiences, and I cannot begrudge her violent reaction against anything that smacks of her personal experiences with a collective form of government.

After all of this, it’s no surprise that she loved the U.S. so much--and that she loved capitalism, which she elevated to something akin to a religion. It also led, I believe, to a fiercely Manichean worldview in which any sacrifice to the general welfare was deemed evil, and selfishness was elevated to the noblest of virtues.

There is a philosophical idea that I think applies here: it’s called bivalence, or “the exclusion of the middle.” It has to do with the notion that often, when trying to formulate a postulate, philosophers tend to push their ideas into either/or configurations: “Either X is true, or Y is true, but it is impossible for them to both be true.” But in the process, they end up excluding everything that might lie between X and Y. And since I am a firm believer that almost nothing in life is strictly black or white, I tend to have rather strong reactions to anyone who asserts otherwise.

(I have been accused of being a relativist, which is true enough, but not entirely true. When discussing the Terry Schiavo case with a fundamentalist Christian she trotted out the relativist argument, and asked whether I believe in anything absolute. My answer: yes, I do. The golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No surprise, Ms. Rand takes exception to this notion, which I’ll get to in a little bit.)

The either/or-ness of Rand’s viewpoint is expressed constantly:

...”society” stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since “the good” is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that “society” may do anything it pleases, since “the good” is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And--since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men--this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

(And before continuing on, let me just note that the entity she calls “society” most definitely exists separate from the individual men of whom it is comprised. I’m in the midst of reading Charles MacKay’s 1841 masterpiece Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which is all about the ways in which group-think differs from the ways individuals think. The famous quote from his Preface sums up his viewpoint: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”)

I would also argue that there’s nothing ethical about her assertion that some men feel entitled to “pursue any whims (or atrocities)” they wish. This obviously goes on all the time (witness almost anything in the news today, from Somalia to Wall Street), but the whole point is that this sort of behavior is not ethical. And once it’s exposed, “society” frequently gets rather upset at just how unethical it all is. Witness the current mass anger at the nation’s financial institutions. Repeatedly, masses of people have woken from their slumber and demanded that the oligarchs change their ways. (And then, just as often, the oligarchs wait for the masses to go back to sleep again and start to slowly change things back—but they can never take it all back, and in this manner, century by century, change does indeed happen.)

Rand also writes:

An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

But what about fire? Fire, by her definition, would be both good and evil, simultaneously: it furthers life by warming us when the weather is cold, and by destroying organisms in food that might threaten us. But unleashed, fire obviously threatens life when it burns your house and perhaps you inside of it. But nowhere does Rand ever consider the vast range of things that might be both good and evil, depending upon the circumstances. Either/or is the only possibility she contemplates.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand has John Galt say:

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.

So if I am not strictly rational (using only her definition) at all times, then I’m suicidal? I don’t think so. I do irrational things all the time. Lots of people do. To cite just one potent example: there was nothing rational about the hundreds of people who flocked to Ground Zero after September 11th, to try and help. Everyone knew there were toxins in the air, everyone knew there was a risk. But people wanted to help, and some have paid the price, but they felt it worth the price just to try to help. Rand would surely call this irrational and suicidal. I call it something else.

She writes,

...let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.

This is the crux of her argument against sacrifice, and for selfishness. Since living is the only possible ultimate value for any entity, then anything that threatens that living must ipso facto be evil. She continues:

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end to itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.

(All italics, by the way, are Rand’s. Like all dogmatists, she is endlessly emphatic.)

To this I have to ask, why must this be exclusive? Why must one’s own happiness exclude any consideration of the happiness of others? Because, after all, sacrifice is not black and white. There are little sacrifices we make all the time that don’t in any way threaten our lives, and that therefore are not even considered in Rand’s ethos. A parent’s million sacrifice for his or her children is a prime example, one that most definitely leads to the continued existence of the human race as a whole and would therefore be, in Rand’s terms, most definitely good and not evil. Yet it involves sacrifice. How does she reconcile this? She doesn’t. It is never even addressed.

Rand’s hatred of sacrifice means that, if the world conducted itself according to her precepts, there could never be armies. But it also means that there could never be firefighters, or policemen. Doctors would never go near someone with a deadly communicable disease. A nuclear engineer would not make the crucial repair that might stop a meltdown. Their refusal to sacrifice would in fact result in the sacrifice of others, which is something that Rand says should never be done. This discrepancy is also never addressed. In fact, she writes...

Altruism holds death as its ultimate goal and standard of value--and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism have achieved and are achieving now.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

The flip side of her hatred of sacrifice is, of course, her promotion of selfishness. And since this is long enough already, I’ll save this side of the discussion for next time.

About That Wascally Ayn Wand

So I'm still fascinated by Ayn Rand, and honest, I'm looking at the material on the aynrand.org website in the hope that I'll find some ideas that don't drive me up a wall. (Some success, but then up the wall again.) And I'll probably report on what I find sometime later. But for now, there's this--prominent Ayn Rand scholar Yaron Brook, providing a video intro to the site...

Because honest, the absolute last thing I expected was that the man would sound like Elmer Fudd...

The Charter for Compassion

I could quibble. "Charter for Compassion" is a phrase that doesn't quite sing, and I think they've got the wrong word: empathy rather than compassion is what they really seem to be going for. But I like what they're going for, so to hell with the quibbling.

Well okay, a little quibbling. The OED defines compassion as "sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others," while it defines empathy as "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Certainly they're similar, but judging by Karen Armstrong's description of the Charter's purpose, empathy, which has a broader reach than sympathy, seems the more apt:

Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other, learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances...

(Ayn Rand, by the way, would probably think this is all a crock. But Ayn Rand can--well, I've been down that road already.)

In 2005 I wrote a long entry here that noted my lifelong belief that our enemies are not our enemies. There seems to be something in the way I'm made, or the way I was raised, or both, that makes me distrust propaganda and dogma--and it's probably the same thing that made me an actor, that makes me a writer. After all, the first job of an actor, of a writer, is to try his/her damnedest to get inside someone else's skin, to understand someone Other and then relay that understanding to an audience.

Here's a story that Laurence Olivier used to tell. He was playing Sergius in Shaw's Arms and the Man, and he hated the character. So one night he's walking somewhere with the director Ken Tynan, and said what he thought of Sergius. "A rotten little shit," or some such language. Tynan immediately said back to him, "Well if you don't like the man you'll never be able to play him well, will you?" Which stopped Olivier cold--and made him a better actor.

So as soon as I heard Ms. Armstrong on Bill Moyers's show, talking about compassion, and the golden rule, and the audacious idea of crafting a document extolling these virtues on a global scale, trying to reinsert into the human conversation something that should have been there all along, I immediately responded. My heart sang, and I even found myself, for just a moment, thinking that maybe I could get along with Ayn Rand after all if I would just make the effort.

The golden rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I mean come on. What else is there?

A Simple Desultory Apologetic

Billy Graham?

Okay, so I got the words wrong. The title of the preceding entry, which quoted Paul Simon's "A Simple Desultory Philippic" (his Bob Dylan parody), should have read: "I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded
 / Communist, 'cause I'm left-handed." I have what I call "interesting hearing"--it's not very accurate, but it sure does make the world more interesting. Personally, I think Mr. Simon should consider redoing the lyrics my way.

(Oh--bonus points to anyone who knows, off the top of their head--honor system!,--the next line of the song.)

Randiacs!

Speaking of the preceding entry, apparently there are Ayn Rand devotees who troll the web regularly, because I got responses to that entry faster than to any other entry I've ever written. I'm half-tempted to keep stirring the pot for a while, just for the fun of it, but I think it has already been clearly demonstrated that from their point of view none of my points can ever possibly be valid, and that from my point of view, they're just plain wrong.

(But no, really: are there any Ayn Rand fans with a sense of humor? They're all so bleepin' earnest!)

A Music Video?

Yes, I'll be in a music video. For a truly demented act called "Renfield." Hard to describe, but the MySpace page tells part of the tale. My friend Ezra is directing it, and asked me to be in it.

I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Which is of course the whole fun of it.

I think.

I've Been Ayn Randed and Billy Graham'ded, I'm Communist 'Cause I'm Left-Handed

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.