Lots of interest in Ayn Rand, with two new books about her and her lasting influence:

Which, perhaps, prompted this disappointing piece by Dan Hannan in The American Conservative which has a lot to say about her literary style but almost nothing about her ideas and the inadequacy of her two great works as novels:

Nor do the characters develop. They fall into two categories: listless masses and men of action. Those in the former category mill about dully as an undifferentiated supporting cast. Those in the latter group also are interchangeable. Their faces are invariably made of “angular planes.” They speak “without inflection” or “without emotion.” They make up for this by having impossibly communicative eyes…

P.G. Wodehouse manages such passages beautifully. Ayn Rand doesn’t. Indeed—again, there is no way of putting this without horrifying her legion of admirers—she isn’t much of a prose stylist.

She is especially bad at dialogue, making no attempt at either realism or readability but letting her characters converse in philosophical treatises. Queen Victoria complained that her prime minister, W.E. Gladstone, addressed her as if she were a public meeting. The cast of Atlas Shrugged address each other in a series of essays.

Well, so what?

There are many superb passages in Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, just as there are clunky dull bits if you want to find them. These are Big Books.

The key idea behind them is a simple and so profound question: under which circumstances (if any) does one person owe something to another?

Putting it another way, what  precisely is the moral idea behind the concepts of obligation and responsibility?

Rand explores these themes through a seried of admittedly formulaic characters who each have carefully defined attitudes to personal responsibility and its implications.

At one end of the spectrum are two unyielding men who insist on the highest principles – and pay a heavy price for doing so, Howard Roark and John Galt. At the other are sundry communists and weaklings bent on exploiting the generosity and effort of others for the sake of their own power. Along the spectrum are all sorts of people who for one reason or the other make unhappy or ruinous compromises and suffer accordingly.

Perhaps the greatest passage describing the consequences of moral confusion and irresponsibility is the one in Atlas Shrugged where a train hurtles to disaster.

The story is set against the background of the rise of fascism and communism and the battles of corporate leaders and other front-rank creative people to stay independent. The main corporation is a huge railway, which is struggling to stay in business as excessive government demands and consequent crumbling business loyalties lead to systemic decay.

It all comes to a head when a decision has to be taken. Should the main transcontinental express go through a dangerous tunnel or not? The corrupt top executives want the train to run to keep up the corporation’s reputation and so save their own skins, but shirk the responsibility of saying so lest something go wrong. Thus the decision is passed literally far down the line to a frightened junior clerk. The doomed train chugs off into the darkness.

Rand describes that situation brilliantly and relentlessly. But to bludgeon the point home she fills the train with all sorts of archetypal collectivist passengers, who themselves have wanted the luxury of enjoying the fruits of private creativity while sneering at it and extolling socialist mediocrity.

Crash.

This famous scene is, of course, sneered at by modern collectivist Johann Hari of the Independent, who manages to describe it with unerring inaccuracy, completely (and deliberately?) missing the point of the episode and the book itself. Such incompetent work is what wins a Stonewall Award these days. Well done, Johann!

In short, the ‘selfishness’ Ayn Rand espoused was all about the joy and pain of having the very highest standards of self-respect and – therefore – respect for others.

Which brings us to Barry Ritholz: The Boring Bitch is Back. What a fine philosophy this person (who admits that he has not read the books for decades) advocates:

My actual problem with Rand — behind her blindingly horrific prose — is that she was pushing back against a totalitarian system in the Soviet Union, a corrupt and morally indefensible system she had every right to be infuriated by. But she applies that righteous fury and outrage to a Democracy, whose economy is Free Market based. Hence, rather than challenging the politburo, she challenges Unions. Cooperative behavior seems to be hard for her to grasp…

Worst of all, Rand’s Objectivism has become the rationale for all manner of morally repugnant behaviour. However, I did take one personal lesson from Atlas Shrugged to heart: Anytime I see a parked car with a John Galt bumper sticker, I like to knock off one of the sideview mirrors, and leave it on the hood. I include a note stating my selfish, random act made me feel good, and therefore should be a perfectly fine act in their world.

I assume the recipients miss the irony . . .

Just the sort of furtive, trite, cowardly nihilism which Rand so eloquently demolished.