It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand
Saint No. 3: Ayn Rand
That's right, baby, this die-hard Democrat is an Ayn Rand fan and has been since she read The Fountainhead - as a teenager, of course. I think I walked around with a dazed smile on my face for about a week. That's right, I was thinking. Those things she says, they make sense. They fit with what I see in the world around me. Things nobody had ever said aloud in my hearing before, like that people who make others their reason for living end up bitter and resentful and miserable. Like that when anyone preaches the virtue of sacrifice to you, ask yourself who's going to be picking up what you sacrifice. Like that the doctrine of original sin is a way to make people more dependent, because guilty people are easier to control. Like that many, many people will hate you not for your sins, not for your crimes, but for your honesty and your talent and all your best qualities. Like that when someone tells you that anything is a beautiful mystery that you're not supposed to understand and that you must feel, not think: what they're really saying is that you must just do what they say without question or justification. Like that other people's weakness is not a leash around your neck.
Savaged by the Left, shunned by the Right because of her atheism, her books remain popular and her influence remains extensive. And so she is one of the great teachers of the problem with religion. As she puts it: 'Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as "instinct," "intuition," "revelation,' or any form of "just knowing... Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are impossible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: "It's so, because I say so," will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later.'
And yes, her books and her philosophy are flawed, thoroughly. If there's a theme that has been running through this glance at the non-religious search for truth, it's that, as has been said over and over, it's cumulative. Scientists and philosophers find a little bit at a time. It falls to their successors to point out the things they got wrong and do better. Only the religious must claim that every part of their Holy Books have value, and not a single thing in them is stupid or wrong or safely ignored. Rand's writing is not holy and quite a bit of it is stupid or tiresome or naive or cruel. Reading it is like any real-world investigation. You cannot simply accept, and believe. You have to think. You have to identify the dross and put it away. And it's worth it, because the rest of it... shines.
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