My wife and I became engaged, fortunately, before I entered my Ayn Rand phase.  I doubt she would have gone on a second date with me had the chronology been different.

I must have been about twenty years old when I first read Fountainhead.  As an economics major being indoctrinated into what history now calls the “Chicago School,”  and as a midshipman being taught how, as we used to say, to “kill Commies for Christ” (I kid you not!), I devoured Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism as though I had found the answers to the meaning of life.

I learned to make statements like Yaron Brook in his recent Wall Street journal op-ed essay, “Is Rand Relevant?”:

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism—and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention—and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rational selfishness.  My fiance (now my wife) did not buy it, and swiftly let me know that it was time for me to rationally choose between Ayn Rand and her. (Praise the Lord!) 

Brook’s op-ed essay seeks to remind us in our present crisis that Ayn Rand long ago gave us the good news that “self-sacrifice to the needy” is immoral.  In our current struggles, we should not listen to those weak-kneed Christians, Brook implies, for

The message is always the same: “Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.” But Rand said this message is wrong—selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue.

In retrospect, it’s seems to me that Rand’s Ideal Man is Nietzche’s Ubermann spouting free market capitalism in response to the ideology of communism, from which Rand had fled.  But, as a young man seeking a guiding light for my life,  I had no priest to intervene as I wandered down the path Rand had sent me, trusting in her gospel of self-sufficiency and power. 

Today, when I read Augustine’s Confessions, I understand well how he fell in with the Manicheans and Platonists en route to baptism, for I similarly spent several years under Rand’s spell before realizing I had taken a false trail. 

I pray that young men and women reading Brook’s Randian gospel, and perhaps being tempted to turn to Ayn Rand for hope in these difficult times, will be blessed with a mentor to guide them into the Way of truth.

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Thanks for this post Craig.  I thought you might appreciate this excerpt from Whitaker Chambers’ review of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review.  You can read the whole thing at http://tinyurl.com/3twxh

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feeling at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.

Thanks for the link, Fr. David.  It took me awhile before I realized why I did not recognize the author’s name as one of the NR pundits, and then I saw that it was from their archives: “This piece by Whittaker Chambers appeared in the December 28, 1957, issue of NR”.  Only 13 years after the close of WWII. 

Obviously I agree with Mr. Chambers. 

Thanks again for sharing the review.

Craig,

Yet another thing that we have (at least partly) in common, besides our common former employer. I too, found some truth in Rand. It was only after returning to God, and to the Church, in my mid-20s and observing the way in which the world works that I found that in Rand which was of value. And it was that her ideas led me to people who would point me toward Hayek and von Mises, especially the former. At about the age of 55 it dawned on me that the most, and perhaps the only, consistent way to be just to others was to fully observe that portion of the final vow of baptism in the BCP that requires that we “respect the dignity of every human being.” God lead me from being what Rand would prescribe to what Hayek called an “Old Whig.” It isn’t simply the Randian path that leads to what Fr. Kendrick terms an “inflexibly self-righteous stance.” It is the failure to recognize our own limitations—the same limitations that were manifest in the Fall—not only as individuals, but also collectively as a nation and as a species. And they are limitations which are constantly rehearsed, in the political arena, as notably as in any other.

Blessings and regards.