Atlas Shrugged and Tragic Shortage of Selfishness
I have already driven away one Objectivist, a man whose opinion and principles I somewhat admired, because he was offended that I listed her along with Robert Heinlein and John Norman as persons devoted to the Sexual Revolution and hence to the overthrow of normal, sane, civilized, and Christian sexual morality or, to use the technical term, the truth about sex.
So it is with some trepidation that I reveal that the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the truths of the Christian religion are incompatible: I trust no one is so shocked by the news that he too will depart in anger. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is an atheist creed that follows Epicurean moral reasoning, holding that man’s good and goal in life (this life only) is the pursuit of self interest rightly understood.
Admirer as I may be of her work, where Rand disagrees with the truth of things, there she and I part ways. Not to put too coy a face on the matter, the lady is a heretic, that is, someone who took some small part of the Jewish and Christian religion, our concern for the individual soul, and inflated it to become a monstrous idol bent on overwhelming the other parts of the religion, such as, for example, love of charity.
Her vinegar is useful enough to wipe away the sickening stains of that other heretic, Marx, and his many collectivist and relativist and Politically Correct epigones, and so wins my salute; but she also supports adultery and aborticide and other abominations and gross lapses of logic.
Also, she does not like Tolstoy. Unforgivable!
Hence it is with some pleasure that I read this from the Christian theologian whose work I most admire, Mr. David Bentley Hart:
I like the Sermon on the Mount. She [Ayn Rand] regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness.
This is part of his review of the new Atlas Shrugged film, which he regards, perhaps rightly, as a sign of the Ragnarok. Read here for an amusing degree of Ayn Randian vitriol, employed denouncing Rand, but with considerably more humor and lightness than she was wont to employ:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-trouble-with-ayn-rand
And while we are admiring movie reviews, check out this from Bill Whittle, where he discusses the Cthulhu-level shocking and blasphemous insanity known as the flick version of STARSHIP TROOPERS, and the beloved Woody Woodpecker vehicle, DESTINATION MOON :
http://declarationentertainment.com/take-movie-work-starship-troopers-and-destination-moon
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
