Second-hander’s news
How things have changed since my first reading of *The Fountainhead*! I haven’t read Rand since my very early twenties, possibly my very late teens. I found the central theme of Rand’s work in *The Fountainhead* to run parallel to my maturation in the time between the first reading and today. The older I get, the less I care what other people think.
I tend to distrust those who claim not to care about other people’s opinions. It’s a facile claim, and if true, why bother telling me? Why do you care what I think about you not caring what I think? Complete indifference to others seems neither a healthy nor desirable ideal. Nevertheless, if I had to choose the most significant difference between myself at eighteen and myself at thirty-eight it is that I now care much less than I did then what other people think.
This is Rand’s ideal. The highest virtue she paints is Howard Roark, the architect who is untroubled by concern for the opinions of others. The lowest weakness is shown in Peter Keating, barely aware that he is entitled to an opinion not given him by someone else. For the height of villainy we are given Ellsworth Toohey, who aspires to be the myopic king in the land of the blind, and who will stop at nothing to destroy those with original thought.
I doubt that Rand has been accused of subtlety. She goes to extremes in her caricatures of those who follow Toohey, and of the rhetoric spread to undermine those with talent. It could be parody if there were humor in it, but instead her undisguised disdain portraying the «second-handers» and their words turns this mockery into a failed straw-man argument. It’s not honest to criticize others based on your own exaggerations of their shortcomings.
Here is Rand saying there is no such thing as individual obligation to society, that when anyone hear the words «duty» or «sacrifice» it is time to run the other direction. We therefore have no obligation to pay taxes; we do so only because the government’s guns are pointed at our heads. We are to understand that nothing is collective, nothing is common among countrymen.
In her later book *[Atlas Shrugged]([canonical-url:2009/04/05/greed-good-shoulders])* she brings up this exception, but reading just from *The Fountainhead*, I found myself wondering if she really believed that the defense of the freedoms she valued in the United States could be left up to the individual. Would she really have been all right with the Red Army marching across an America defended only by farmers with shotguns? I have to wonder if she thought it was a rhetorical point not worth making when she wrote *The Fountainhead* or whether before writing *Atlas Shrugged* she began to see, perhaps grudgingly, the truth in Abraham Lincoln’s assertion that the job of government is to «do for the people what needs to be done but which they can not by individual effort do at all *or do so well* for themselves» (emphasis mine).[^1]
[^1]:Please also allow me here to cite the above quotation, as when I researched to get it correct I encountered the websites of conservative pundits who cast doubt as to whether Lincoln ever said those words. I refer you to *Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln*, edited by Marion Mills Miller and published in 1907. This was taken from fragmentary notes on or about July 1st 1854. Lincoln used this phrase and close variants several times in these notes, the first of which he put inside quotation marks, which leads me to suspect he may have been referring to another author. If you believe attributing to the first Republican president such a belief must be a hoax perpetrated by a leftist conspiracy, I don’t know what to tell you.
I’m ambivalent about criticizing Rand. Part of her thesis is vitally important and found too rarely in our society. At the same time, I’m troubled by the logical fallacies by which she supports her arguments. Roark is the near-perfect individual who never compromises his integrity and never exerts power over another. As long as you don’t count the rape. Even stipulating that this was an exceptional case and necessary as part of the development of the story, I cannot reconcile it with Roark saying that he had never held power over another and never would.
I respect Rand’s total opposition to anything that falls short of total *laissez-faire* capitalism. She escaped the tyranny of Soviet Russia and it is only natural that she associates any attribute of that regime with evil.
Anyone who thinks wants to understand, and Rand was clearly a thinker. Trouble begins when the discomfort of not understanding leads us to jump to simplistic conclusions. Rand looked at capitalism versus communism and religion versus atheism and simplified it all down to selfishness versus altruism.
Rand makes the mistake that all partisans make: she chooses one and rejects the other. She does not allow for interdependence. There is only dependence and independence. In Rand’s view any attempt to help one another is a sacrilege, because it creates dependence. She believed that if everyone acted independently to further their own interests while not holding power over anyone else, we would live in a utopia of self-actualization. She believed that a thinking man by himself can always outsmart and defeat a mountain lion.
I don’t accept this. At some point before history, hundreds of people acted in concert to build stone walls to protect themselves against invaders and predators. These walled cities were not built by a single person alone, and everyone who participated (in at least the earliest of these sorts of efforts) did so to selfishly protect themselves. The whole became stronger than the sum of its parts. Divided, we could be picked off by animals one by one. United in common effort, we could leverage our intelligence into a position of superior power despite relative physical weakness.
Some of the partisans will tell you that the collective is the vital ingredient. Others of the partisans say that the inventiveness of the single person who thought up the idea to build a wall around a central living area and take turns guarding against animals is all that matters. They are both fatally wrong and Rand is one of the latter.
Rand is absolutely right when she says that evil takes the form of people telling us to sacrifice ourselves for a common good. She is absolutely wrong in saying that there is not such a thing as a common good. It sounds great to hear that man’s ego is the pinnacle of all creation, but we don’t do ourselves any good by flattering ourselves.
This detracts from a vital message. Rand ties it directly to creative integrity and autonomy of thought. A life based on other people’s opinions and expectations is an inauthentic one. People need to hear and heed this message. But equating personal authenticity to a rejection that there is more to life than self means that the baby has to go out with the bathwater. What’s wonderful about *The Fountainhead* is that Rand shows us that we can be so much more than we are. And what’s terrible about *The Fountainhead* is that she tells us that that’s all there is.
At several points in the book Rand compares the experience of looking at nature and feeling small with the experience of looking at nature and feeling powerful. I’ve had occasion to go to the top of Mount Tamalpais where, on a clear day, one can see the entire San Francisco Bay. There are many spectacular mountaintop vistas in the world, this one presents a unique opportunity. The San Francisco Bay is visible even on a twelve-inch diameter globe. From this perspective and remembering the size of the Bay on the globe, one can mentally extrapolate the size of the Earth. The Earth, if my mental extrapolations are accurate, is pretty big. I cannot apprehend that sort of scale without a shift in my perspective. It is emboldening to stretch my imagination around an object of this size, and at the same time it is inescapable that it is much bigger than me.
It is as vital an experience as I may hope to have for my creative faculties to exceed my own assumptions while *at the same time* understanding that I am a part of something immensely vaster than myself. Rand tells us we have to choose one aspect of this and reject the other. She only made it half way. But how can I complain when she shows a way much closer to authentic than most people get?
