Ayn Rand — VOICES for REASON

Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905. To commemorate the 107th anniversary of her birth, ARC analyst Don Watkins has an op-ed on FoxNews.com today, in which he discusses the controversy over Rand’s influence on today’s politics.

“Rand has clearly inspired millions,” he writes, ”But a debate has emerged over the question of Rand’s political influence, with many commentators claiming her ideas have played a key role in shaping the political landscape. . . . But to gauge Rand’s influence, we need to know more about her views than the sound bites we’re typically offered.”

Why are Tea Partiers, political commentators, and politicians talking about a philosopher almost thirty years after her death? Read the article to find out.

Earlier this week Penguin, the publisher of Atlas Shrugged, released an application for Apple’s iPad that offers readers an amplified edition of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. Instead of buying the text-only e-book of the novel, you can purchase this application, which offers many additional features that allow you to learn more about the novel, Ayn Rand, and her ideas.

The app contains four main sections: “The Book,” “The Author,” “The Philosophy” and “Hall of Atlas.”

• “The Book” section offers the full text of Atlas Shrugged. In addition, app users can share their favorite passages from the text on social media sites and see manuscript pages of various sections of the novel.
• “The Author” section features a biography of Ayn Rand, a graphic timeline of her life, a gallery of photos of Rand and key documents related to her work, and recollections of Rand by Leonard Peikoff, her longtime associate and intellectual heir.
• In “The Philosophy” section, users can read about the essentials of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and listen to an audio lecture by Rand describing her philosophy. Users can also listen to Rand’s 1964 talk “Is Atlas Shrugging?”
• The “Hall of Atlas” section offers users many video and audio interviews of Rand discussing the main themes in Atlas Shrugged and other intellectual topics. Users can also take an interactive quiz that tests whether they can correctly attribute quotes from the novel to their respective characters, access discussion questions, and view further reading resources.

To find out more about the Atlas Shrugged iPad app, and to see a gallery of screen shots, please visit the iTunes App Store. The app sells for $14.99.

My colleague Don Watkins just posted an online comment to a recent column by Al Lewis concerning Ayn Rand. Ordinarily Don wouldn’t have bothered, except that Lewis’s diatribe went out under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal, the nation’s largest circulation daily newspaper. I’ve reproduced Don’s comment in its entirety below:

Al Lewis suggests that today’s prominent admirers of Ayn Rand (such as Rep. Paul Ryan, Rush Limbaugh, and Justice Clarence Thomas) “would be crushed to learn that she might never love them back.” Lewis wants us to know how baffled he is at Rand’s refusal, during her lifetime, to forge alliances with everyone who claimed to have something in common with her politics.

Lewis’s column, for all its childish, hit-and-run bluster, invites attention to an important fact about Ayn Rand. As a crusader for laissez-faire capitalism, Rand traced the historical decline of freedom to a series of crucial intellectual errors. Her task, as she saw it, was to advance rigorous arguments demonstrating the system’s virtues, in order to persuade reasonable people to change their minds.

It was this serious mission that kept Rand on constant watch for advocates who might claim to be her allies, but whose arguments actually undermined the cause of freedom. Consider the examples Lewis mentions. When libertarians argued that capitalism leads to anarchism—or when Reaganite conservatives argued that a woman’s individual right to the pursuit of happiness must be sacrificed to a month-old embryo—or when right-leaning Christians argued that the profit motive, though immoral, is tolerable because it benefits society—Ayn Rand distanced herself and her philosophy from those movements. Why? Because she thought their arguments would hurt, rather than help, the cause of freedom.

In today’s world, to be selective about one’s allies is to invite accusations of dogmatism. But it was precisely Rand’s lack of dogmatism—her conviction that only rational, persuasive arguments can change the world—that made her so careful about avoiding confusion in making the case for capitalism.

From the wild array of accusations, distortions, and half-truths contained in Lewis’s column, I have selected this one issue for a too-brief discussion—the rest don’t merit rebuttal. Rand’s arguments and alliances deserve to be taken seriously, not treated in the cavalier fashion that Lewis adopts.

The Objectivist Academic Center (OAC) is currently accepting applications for its Fall 2011 incoming class. Designed to provide expert guidance in the study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, this program is for those who are serious about advocating pro-reason, pro-individual rights, pro-capitalism views in the intellectual arena.

Aimed at young and ambitious students with the energy and drive to make a difference in the world, the OAC program begins with a one-year course focusing on philosophical understanding and communication skills. Students who complete the one-year course are eligible to apply to an Advanced Education Program. There is no charge for the Core Course or for the Advanced Education Program.

The application deadline for Fall admission is July 29, 2011.

The Christian Science Monitor has my thoughts on the Tea Party movement and what it needs to succeed. Although the prospects are unfortunately dim, for reasons I give in the article, I do suggest there is a glimmer of hope, if the movement decides to get serious about individualism:

The tea party’s adherents would need to discover the moral principle underlying the often quoted but little understood ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They would need to argue that all schemes that sacrifice the individual to society are morally wrong. And they would need to argue that this country’s most rational and industrious citizens—including business leaders, doctors, health insurers, and taxpayers and productive individuals in all walks of life—are oppressed victims who deserve to be liberated, by permanent repeal of laws and regulations that invade their rights.

In short, the tea party would need to fully embrace individualism as a moral ideal. Although the odds against this are exceedingly large, I think there’s some cause for optimism. For the first time, a resistance movement is looking for answers in Ayn Rand’s writings. From the original public rant that inspired the tea party idea (when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli said “at the end of the day, I’m an Ayn Rander”) to last fall’s US Senate victory by Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson (who calls “Atlas Shrugged” his “foundational book”), Rand’s uncompromising defense of individualism has become a part of the tea-party mix.

Can the tea party deliver on its promise to cut back big government? Yes it can, but not unless its supporters awaken to the need for moral intransigency in pursuing individual liberty.

I’ll be interested to read the comments that are accumulating, to see how other interested observers view the movement’s future. And this just in: Yahoo News has picked up the article.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

It has been many years since I’ve visited the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey—but I recall it as a fascinating place to learn about, and pay homage to, an inventive genius. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you might want to take advantage of a fee-free “Edison Day” on Sept. 25 or Nov. 11. This informative article from The Wall Street Journal gives some of the reasons why:

In this era of cyberspace and fiber-optics, our image of an inventor tends to revolve around intangible diagrams manipulated on a computer screen by technogeeks working behind sliding glass doors. But back when Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was opening up the new age of electricity, the act of inventing usually involved prototypes made of very tangible materials—spring steel, cast iron, polished brass, beveled glass and varnished oak. Edison’s world ran on tooled gears, tanned leather, rubber, tar-paper and shelves of chemicals in hand-labeled bottles with ground glass stoppers. Machinery in motion really moved—flywheels spinning, pistons snorting, belts running from driveshafts—while smoke, tallow and machine oil lent their pungent smells to the air. . . .

In the West Orange lab, Edison and his staff invented, among other things, a successful alkaline storage battery, a fluoroscope for viewing X-ray images, and a method of erecting poured-concrete buildings. Here they also developed motion pictures and conducted experiments toward adding sound to the silent movies. In the surrounding factory buildings, with their own large work forces, Edison ran the various businesses born of his inventions, including the manufacture of movie cameras, film and projectors, and his favorite enterprise, the Edison Phonograph Co., with its vast catalog of phonographs and recordings released under the Edison label. Indeed, Edison effectively invented the modern entertainment industry.

Edison’s career stands as an eloquent symbol of the productive human mind. As we close the door on another Labor Day holiday, it’s worth thinking about how much we owe to those men and women whose mental labor makes the creation of industrial wealth possible. Here’s a short passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on that theme:

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

Are you curious about that last comment, concerning the “work of the philosopher”? You really have to read the book!

Image: WikiMedia Commons

The Objectivist Academic Center is currently accepting applications for its Fall 2010 incoming class. Designed to provide a comprehensive and systematic study of philosophy, Objectivism and objective communication, this unique program is for those who are serious about advocating pro-reason, pro-individual rights, pro-capitalism views.

The program is especially designed for full-time college students, for whom there is next to no cost. Applications from professionals interested in pursuing careers as intellectual activists are also welcome.

For those who are not able to commit to a full program, the OAC offers an auditing option. Consider taking our “Seminar in Ayn Rand’s Philosophy of Objectivism.”

The final application deadline for this year is July 30.

In honor of the 105th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth (February 2, 1905), I’d like to recommend Jeff Britting’s short but surprisingly comprehensive biography, Ayn Rand. Lavishly illustrated with items from the Ayn Rand Archives (a special department Britting manages within the Ayn Rand Institute), this biography is especially valuable because it pays close attention to the mental choices and processes by which Ayn Rand shaped her own character and ideology.

Britting’s biography traces Rand’s brilliant successes to the fundamental choices she made—choices about how to manage her own thinking and action. It started in early childhood, Britting observes, with a vigorously questioning attitude “aimed at understanding the things around her.” (p. 4) As she entered her teens, she “began asking why she liked what she did and, as a result, she began integrating her ideas into wider generalizations. She called this approach to integrating ideas ‘thinking in principle.’” (p. 13) Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the economic collapse and backlash against the growth of government, interest in Ayn Rand exploded in 2009. Within six months of 2009, bookstore sales of Atlas Shrugged had doubled the record of 200,000 set in 2008, and they are expected to exceed 400,000. Discussion of Rand and her views was a regular occurrence in the media, with some even dubbing 2009 “the year of Ayn Rand.”

Undoubtedly Ayn Rand’s popularity 27 years after her death was remarkable, and I view it as a positive sign that so many Americans saw on some level the connection between Atlas Shrugged and current events. I’d like to think, however, that the year of Ayn Rand would not be characterized by billion dollar government bailouts, the inauguration of a statist president elected on a platform as vacuous as “hope and change,” and government takeovers of automakers, financial institutions and the health care system.

On the contrary, a truly “Ayn Rand year” would witness the casting off of these and all other government chains. But this would require a much deeper process of intellectual and cultural change than we have yet seen. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an unpublished letter ARC’s Yaron Brook sent to the Wall Street Journal in response to an op-ed by Heather Wilhelm:

Dear Editor,

After indulging in a truly dazzling series of ad hominem attacks on philosopher Ayn Rand, Heather Wilhelm does manage to raise one important issue: she asserts that Rand, whose books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands a year, is not an effective salesman for capitalism. Whereas Rand is allegedly “elitist, cold and laser-focused on the supermen and superwomen of the world,” Wilhelm claims that what capitalism truly needs is an explanation of “how everyone, especially society’s neediest” benefit from economic liberty. That claim betrays an appalling ignorance of history.

Capitalism’s defenders have appealed to its beneficent effects since its inception. Accepting the conventional view that service to the needy is the essence of morality, they have downplayed and denied the essence of capitalism: the profit motive and the unrestricted pursuit of rational self-interest. This approach hasn’t worked. So long as even the free market’s defenders feel guilty and embarrassed by capitalism’s selfish nature, any attempt to reverse the anticapitalist trend is hopeless. Who is going to believe that vice is the path to the good?

What Rand offers is a radical alternative—a proper, moral defense of capitalism’s essence.

Rand argued that the proper standard of morality is the objective requirements of human life. She argued that human life requires productive achievement, and that the noblest act of moral virtue is using one’s mind to create life-sustaining values. She argued that profit is moral because it enriches the individual who achieves it—that someone like Bill Gates deserves the highest moral praise, not for giving away his wealth, but for creating it. Thus Rand advocated capitalism precisely because it is the only system that rewards the profit motive and respects the individual’s right to act on his own judgment in the pursuit of his own life and happiness. And yes, that includes not only the most intelligent and successful, but every individual committed to making his life the best life it can be. Capitalism is good, Rand argued, because selfishness, correctly understood, is a virtue.

Wilhelm’s views aside, Rand continues to be the greatest salesman capitalism has ever had. It’s not hard to discern why: whereas the rest of the world looked at capitalism and saw the hollow pursuit of material gain, Rand saw man the hero free to seek his highest values.

Read the rest of this entry »