7thriv

Here's a peculiar article that ran on the front-page of the NY Times Sunday Business section. It claims to be about BB&T chairman John Allison IV, but it's really an extended critique of Ayn Rand. As Rand has had a mini-resurgence since the commencement of Obamanomics, this could not be allowed to stand.

BB&T has survived the chaos of the last year, although it did accept TARP money at the specific request of Hank Paulson, who wanted to bailout Citibank, but did not want to give the appearance of having done so. Allison has retired as BB&T's CEO, and is now barn storming the country denouncing the Wall Street Bailouts and spreading the message of Randian Objectivism. He may be the most prominent person in public life who is speaking to the great unease many feel about the increased corporatization of government, and the increased nationalization of the corporate sector.

If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic — and sexy — than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth.Or, as Mr. Allison explained, “put balls and chains on good people, and bad things happen.”

Ms. Rand, who died in 1982, has all sorts of admirers on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms and in the entertainment industry, including the hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, the former baseball great Cal Ripken Jr. and the Whole Foods chief executive, John Mackey.

But Mr. Allison, who remains BB&T’s chairman after retiring as chief executive in December, has emerged as perhaps the most vocal proponent of Ms. Rand’s ideas and of the dangers of government meddling in the markets. For a dedicated Randian like him, the government’s headlong rush to try to rescue and fix the economy is a horrifying realization of his worst fears.

Indeed, so many bad things are happening that many followers of Ms. Rand, known as objectivists, believe that the ugly scenario in her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” — in which the government takes over industry as the economy progressively collapses — is playing out in real life.

I'll be honest here: despite many years' worth of comments that I would "really love" Ayn Rand, I have never felt any great need to read her books. She was famously "read out" of the conservative movement by Whittaker Chambers decades ago. I think there's something to the critique that her philosophy encourages a sort of grasping selfishness. Mostly, she strikes me as the sort of writer that most people read and love in college, and I am no longer in college.

Nonetheless, I can understand why so many businesspeople and political conservatives find her appealing. If you are looking for a serious, literary exploration of conservative themes, you will find very little in 20th century literature that is satisfactory. 20th & 21st century literature, indeed virtually all serious art from the past 100 years, is almost uniformly liberal or progressive in its orientation. You literally have to go back to Trollope, Tolstoy and (especially) Dostoyevsky* to find the greatest conservative fiction. It's very easy to get a liberal arts education in a typical American college and have at least a passing familiarity with leftist thought, but not once hear the names Burke, Hayek, Rand, etc. in a classroom setting.

The NY Times, of course, goes out of its way to denigrate Rand, trotting out the usual philosophy pundit to give the reliable conventional wisdom that Rand was not a "real" philosopher.

The enduring popularity of Ms. Rand bewilders her many detractors, who complain that her writing is melodramatic, heavy-handed and intellectually bereft.

“To describe her as a minor figure in the history of philosophical thinking about knowledge and reality would be a wild overstatement,” says Brian Leiter, director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago. “She’s irrelevant.”

Professor Leiter conducted an informal poll in March on his philosophy blog, asking, “Which person do you most wish the media would stop referring to as a ‘philosopher’?” The choices were Jacques Derrida, Ms. Rand and Leo Strauss. Ms. Rand won by a landslide, with 75 percent of the roughly 1,500 votes cast.

Professor Leiter says Ms. Rand’s views on moral philosophy and objective reality are “simple-minded in the extreme.”

“She doesn’t understand the historical positions of thinkers on these issues, such as Hume and Kant,” he says. “Even the minority of philosophers with some sympathy for her celebration of the virtues of selfishness usually find her general philosophical system embarrassing.”

That is pure intellectual snobbery in action. I agree that Hume and Kant are deeper thinkers than Rand, but have read enough Kant to state categorically (hee hee) that he has little, if anything, to offer to the average businessman looking for the consolation of philosophy. Rand, on the other hand, is just what the doctor ordered. Is she perfect? Of course not. But a person who is naturally inclined to a pro-business, limited government position has to make a real effort to find contemporary literary or intellectual works that speak to his interests. Rand, at least, has the virtue of having been a best-selling author with a well-developed system of thought. The shame is not that people are reading Rand; it's that there is an unspoken cultural embargo against conservative thought, such that someone like Rand is the only conservative writer that the average person is likely to have heard of.

*one of the best kept secrets of literature is Dostoyevsky's conservatism, which is present in virtually all of his great works. Famed literary critic Laura Bush is one of the few people who have discussed this publicly.