Oct 17, 2024 02:39 PM
Atlas Schlepped: Review of Alexandra Popoff's "Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success" (Jewish Lives)
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/literatu...schlepped/
EXCERPTS: . . . In the 1950s and 1960s, Rand’s novels and essays achieved enormous popularity. Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on college campuses; a handful of influential figures, most notably Alan Greenspan, the future chair of the Federal Reserve, were at one time her disciples; and her books have sold tens of millions of copies. Although serious scholars and journals regarded her novels as devoid of literary merit, they felt obliged to argue with them. For a while, there was no escaping Ayn Rand.
Rand’s family was tolerably well-off and well connected; in her prestigious gymnasium, she befriended Vladimir Nabokov’s sister Olga. Rand never identified with Judaism and, after she arrived in America in 1926 assiduously avoided mentioning it. [...] never wrote about Jews. ... As a young man growing up in the Bronx, I, like most other immature intellectuals, read and discussed Rand, but if anyone was aware of her Jewish background, no one mentioned it.
[...] When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. ... Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.
[...] In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged.
[...] Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”
Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”
[...] Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.
[...] It followed for Rand that there can be no innate—that is, unchosen—ideas. Neither can there be original sin or any inborn tendencies. John Galt calls such thinking a “monstrous absurdity” because either man is free or he isn’t; if his will is limited in any way, then he “can be neither good nor evil.” Had she read Darwin?
So insistent was Rand that behavior is entirely governed by will that when her long-suffering husband, Frank, developed dementia, she insisted on treating his lapses as voluntary failures... (MORE - details)
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/literatu...schlepped/
EXCERPTS: . . . In the 1950s and 1960s, Rand’s novels and essays achieved enormous popularity. Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on college campuses; a handful of influential figures, most notably Alan Greenspan, the future chair of the Federal Reserve, were at one time her disciples; and her books have sold tens of millions of copies. Although serious scholars and journals regarded her novels as devoid of literary merit, they felt obliged to argue with them. For a while, there was no escaping Ayn Rand.
Rand’s family was tolerably well-off and well connected; in her prestigious gymnasium, she befriended Vladimir Nabokov’s sister Olga. Rand never identified with Judaism and, after she arrived in America in 1926 assiduously avoided mentioning it. [...] never wrote about Jews. ... As a young man growing up in the Bronx, I, like most other immature intellectuals, read and discussed Rand, but if anyone was aware of her Jewish background, no one mentioned it.
[...] When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. ... Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.
[...] In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged.
[...] Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”
Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”
[...] Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.
[...] It followed for Rand that there can be no innate—that is, unchosen—ideas. Neither can there be original sin or any inborn tendencies. John Galt calls such thinking a “monstrous absurdity” because either man is free or he isn’t; if his will is limited in any way, then he “can be neither good nor evil.” Had she read Darwin?
So insistent was Rand that behavior is entirely governed by will that when her long-suffering husband, Frank, developed dementia, she insisted on treating his lapses as voluntary failures... (MORE - details)