New Biographies of Ayn Rand Resurrect "Selfishness" as a Courageous Philosophical Proposition

There are two new biographies of Alissa Rosenbaum, aka Ayn Rand, and there is something magnetically car accidental about them and about her, even for someone who thinks selfishness is not a virtue. We can't help but rubberneck her life simply from amazement. Rand beats reality TV because, whether or not you like her, she mattered.

A recent survey sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Monday Club discovered that after the Bible, Rand's work had the greatest impact on the live of those surveyed. She still sells about 300,000 books a year--best-seller proportions--long after her death.

I have read all her books (and three of her biographies) in the same way I watch right-wing commentators, fanatical religious preachers, and CNBC "Don't Regulate Me" financial news. I listen from time to time to country music and now and then even watch a soap opera or "The View." They are part of the culture and I feel the obligation to understand it and that effort alone would be condemned by Rand and certainly her intellectual precursor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, because it reflects an interest in what other people thing. Such things were a waste of time of Rand and Emerson because what others think, do or need is a waste; it "scatters and withdraws such force from your life...it loses your time...," as Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance. Good works are like penances and we are made invalids by them and they are "apologies for living in the world."

I like and admire Rand at a distance. She learned plotting by studying the work of Victor Hugo and this was a good choice because he moves a complex story well and satisfies the reading needs of the non-experts. Despite the opportunity, she did little for women's rights--quite the opposite in fact, as she believed woman's role was to serve men and she had some convoluted sexual ideas that played out in her fiction and in her real life. Her romantic models in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are for submissive women and manly, dominant, cold and rough men. That's a branch of thinking part from philosophy.

There is something absolutely compelling and alluring about Rand that is unavoidable to anyone who looks into the matter. You don't have to like or agree with her to be amazed at her unbending will, fierce confidence, and marketing skill to invent herself against the bad odds presented by a nation that imagines itself to be Christian. For religious people, especially Christians, she eliminates the thorny problem of sin because she believes in neither God nor the Golden Rule.

However, in a capitalist society she remains and icon. She made herself up and succeeded in making selfishness, cloaked in individualism and objectivism to be sensible, courageous and honest. The despised idea of anything collectives is at the heart of her absolutely dire opposition to Marxism (she's an immigrant from Soviet Russia) or any collective mentality to include church life. It is perhaps ironic that she named her philosophy "objectivism" considering that in the writings of Max, communism was to be an answer to the objectification of workers as capitalism eliminated their creativity and individuality. Marx believed that man was a creative being and that capitalism squashed this instinct--or need--into a mashed together pea soub combining man with his labor.

I do think Rand was courageious and honest. Her task was made easier perhaps because of her committed atheism. It was this atheism, along with her well-known and extended adultery that limited her p9olitical connection with her contemporary conservatives (especially William Buckley and his religious friends) who wanted to adore her. Adultery today is public and increasingly commonplace among our leaders, most ironically among right-wing Christian leaders in the Congress and in the churches.

In the end it appears that Rand's philosophy was not a philosophy at all but an entrepreneurial marketing tool for the institution of herself while giving her fancs and excuse for guilt-free self-centeredness. It's OK. Remember you're courageous and bold and the only person on earth.

These are both fine biographies (although I much prefer the one by Anne Heller) and are wroth rading in order to understand her intellectual resurgence that is periodic and tracks precisley with peiords of conservative political retrenchment.

Reading her intellectual and spiritual anti-matter predecessor, Emerson, is less entertaining for sure and I'd rather have dinner with Rand. I think she would have preferred Emerson's America of the mid-19th century when public financial regulation was essentially non-existent.

Emerson, the found of Transendentalsm, was described by Herman Melville after their 1849 meeting as a man who had a "defect in the region of the heart" and a "self conceit so intensely intelectual that at first on hesitates to call it by its right name." Such a man would be hampered, would he not, b the care of the world? At least Rand can be seen as a living reaction against a Soviet world she new too well. It seems, though, that the things she hated were a natural response in the extreme, to the very things she advocated.