“None of the cool kids like Ayn Rand anyway” and other sneers
Jeff Perren sent me a link to two recent articles about Ayn Rand - “Ayn Rand: engineer of souls” by Anthony Daniels and “One or two thoughts about Ayn Rand” by Roger Kimball - and asked for my thoughts. My reply:
I found Daniels making some fair enough points, pro and con, but was stopped in my tracks when I got to this: “She entirely lacks the literary ability to convey anything admirable, or even minimally attractive, about her heroes, who are the kind of people one would not cross the road to meet, though one might well cross it to avoid them.” The next few paragraphs go on in a similar vein, attempting to support this point with examples.
This conclusion tells me that he misses the very point of Rand - a heroic vision of a moral code - and his lack of sympathy for (or even recognition of) her characters’ virtues is so strong that he’s handicapped in his overall assessment. After seeing this, I lost my motivation to read him. He’s descended into sneering, and it is every bit as unbecoming as that of which he accuses Rand herself.
Kimball’s sneering starts much earlier in his article, so I stopped reading for the same reason.
These are people who are fundamentally unsympathetic to Rand, scratching their head, ostensibly trying to figure out why intelligent or cultured people would like Rand at all, and not doing a very good job of it. I am no more impressed by this than by high school athletes scratching their head about why nerds have any friends in the lunch room, or vice versa. It’s just poor psychological comprehension, if you ask me.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.