From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 03 2002 - 09:32:02 MDT
At 08:05 AM 6/3/02 -0700, Max More wrote:
>Damien -- which *part* of Ayn Rand's basic philosophy (not personality,
>philosophy) do you despise? Is it her rationalism? Her anti-religious
>views? Her realism? Her optimism ("benevolent universe")? Her defense of
>freedom?
Well, to continue in the spirit of mutual admiration with Olga--as she
clearly observed of the blockbuster novels:
< her writing that gave me the creeps, even back then. The more I read
Rand, the more her writing, her philosophy seemed bizarre. What world did
she inhabit? - a world without children, without shades of grey, a world
where the compromised were the bad guys, and the uncompromised were the
heroes and heroines, and, as they say - "that's (essentially) all she
wrote." Ayn had the luxury of sitting around smoking and philosophizing
... and writing about whether the Dominiques of the world should hold out
until they could be taken by force by the Roarks of the world (isn't it
romantic?) >
>Intelligent people should be able to separate a writer's personality and
>hangers-on from the ideas in the works.
Intelligent and sensitive readers should know that novels are not ensembles
of raw ideas (or even cooked ideas); they are projected enactments of an
imagined world that solicit our engagement, our judgement, even our assent.
In Rand's case, she poured out great slabs of romantic tosh as laughable,
and as distasteful, as the equal-and-opposite Soviet Heroic Worker genre.
Now I acknowledge that this kind of thing (of both species) often has a
vivid effect on young minds. I was madly thrilled by Rand as late as age 20
or 21 (but I was a pious Catholic child struggling to get free); it took me
a while to see just what everyone was laughing at.
To the extent that Rand's ideas have validity outside the lurid monochrome
sadomasochism of the novels, I'd prefer to see them deployed--on a list of
recommended books--in the form of philosophy or sociology or whatever--not
as agitprop comic strips.
I realize that many people here will be offended by this assessment. But I
was asked to voice my reasoning on the matter.
Damien Broderick
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