Responses to Ayn Rand's alternative humanism

The September-October issue of The Humanist just came out, and I had hoped that it would publish my letter in response to its wrong-headed article about cryonics in the July-August issue.

I had no such luck, and I have a separate blog post about that article in the works. The letters section did print a couple in response to the July-August issue's article about humanist films which argues for including the film version of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead in that genre.

Specifically, the article says the following:



And the letters say in response:



As the letter by Bob Zannelli in Ocala, FL, shows, lately Rand's critics have fixated on an obscure episode in Rand's 20's, a decade when most of us do stupid things, where she became intrigued by the story about a teenage boy named William Edward Hickman who reportedly kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker. The mystery novelist Michael Prescott wrote about this odd period in Rand's life several years ago, based on published information about her; and Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra mentions Hickman in connection with Rand even earlier; so the Hickman problem hasn't exactly hidden in plain sight. Progressives and mainstream humanists didn't care about Ayn Rand until some prominent people on the right started to talk about her influence on their political views, then they rediscovered this information about her and now regularly use it as a shortcut to try to discredit her.

Rand does give me the sense that she didn't like children, and her hostility towards them comes across in Atlas Shrugged. The hobo Jeff Allen, who had seen better days as an auto worker, tells Dagny Taggart about the time one of the frustrated men at his former employer had struck "a mean, ugly little eight-year-old" girl named Millie Bush who had gotten braces under the company's new health care plan, and had knocked out all her teeth! Rand, in other words, uses her authorial ventriloquism in a way which shows that she didn't want us to feel sorry for the girl's assault and permanent disfigurement, even though as a child she had no control over the situation. I guess Randian heroes don't need orthodontics in their youth.

Rand tries to "balance" that by describing the Objectivist mother (which sounds like a contradiction in terms) in Galt's Gulch who tells Dagny that her two thriving boys, aged 4 and 7, represent the woman's "career," one which she couldn't practice in the socialist America beyond the heroes' doomstead because of all the irrational philosophy they would encounter. When I compare the two depictions of childhood, the latter one about the boys' upbringing in utopian conditions seems to me pro forma and, well, not "heartfelt," for lack of a better word. The former one, about the girl and her braces, hints at something about Rand's real opinion of children. Did Marion Parker make a cameo appearance in Atlas Shrugged as Millie Bush?

And even if the novel does show a holdover from Rand's interest in Hickman, does it really address Rand's world view to focus on this aspect of her life? She didn't write novels celebrating child murderers, after all. I notice that people on the left who become infatuated with terrorists and murderers like Trotsky, Mao, Che Guevara, etc., and who even put up posters of their images in plain sight, don't seem to receive the same opprobrium. Why do they get a pass for admiring men who wreaked murder and rapine wholesale, while condemning Rand who had an irrational infatuation with a murderer with only one known victim? (The Wikipedia article doesn't indicate that the teenage Hickman killed "serially," as the letter in The Humanist claims; but that hasn't stopped Rand-haters from embellishing the story about him at Rand's expense.)

No, I suspect something else accounts for the WTF? reaction mainstream humanists display when they have awakened to the existence of the Rand phenomenon after its long incubation: They see her world view, despite its nutty and absurd aspects, as competition for their version of humanism in the culture wars. And as the example of China's fleeing millionaires suggests, that world view does have its plausible aspects; it does model how many of the world's alpha producers see the state as a dangerous manifestation of human behavior that they either have to manage, avoid or evade for their survival. Instead of focusing on that part of Rand's philosophy, Rand's humanist and progressive critics try to change the subject by dragging out something embarrassing from Rand's past which doesn't matter that much to our lives in the here and now.

Ayn Rand doesn't seem likely to go away, and I predict that the efforts by mainstream humanists and AlterNet types to discredit her won't work because they still act according to her framing of their agenda. Like it or not, it looks increasingly as if the mainstream humanists have a competitor which they don't know how to respond to on its own merits, apart from the use of ad hominem and well-poisoning attacks against it. Ironically they have plenty of empirical arguments they could use instead, but mastering those takes some preparation.