Praise and Prayers for Ayn Rand

Wesley Allen Riddle

      Wesley Allen Riddle is a Policy Advisor to the Virginia-based Future of Freedom Foundation and Fellow at the National Humanities Institute in Washington, DC. He is a historian with degrees from West Point and Oxford.

      Recently, I read an editorial in a Colorado paper that was excerpted from an essay by Ayn Rand. It was about tax credits for education and was current in every sense of the word-except that it was written in 1973. Indeed, Rand was prescient in her commentary about education, as with so many other topics. The U.S. Postal Service put her on its first class postage stamp a few years ago, even though she strongly preferred private mail service to government letter carrying. It was the least they could do for one of America's finest novelists and philosophers of the twentieth century. If you are looking for a good book to read and haven't read an Ayn Rand novel-do it! Start with We the Living, Anthem, or The Fountainhead (Gary Cooper starred in the movie version). Then finish with Atlas Shrugged. Warning: her books are for those who like to think. College students will especially enjoy her books, because her novels are so mentally stimulating and, at the same time, "retro" in the post-modern world. Rand's books force us to come to grips with the philosophical nature of concrete reality. She unmasks the nature of human evil, which hates human excellence and which frustrates achievement at every turn. Everyone feels it, but few know what it is or can explain it-certainly none as well as Ayn Rand. Through her stories, Rand illustrates and explains how and why it is that the individual hero (read possibly you or me) is frustrated virtually from birth-bombarded by the nay-sayers, attacked and opposed by the envious, amoral and intellectually collective man, who dislikes himself and won't take responsibility for his own conscious being. Collective man wants to descend back into nothingness. He wants to die, because he finds living painful. In so doing, he will pull down the good, the honest and the true-excellence that, potentially at least, could be the ideal man in you and me. Collective man gets a sadistic pleasure from doing this and tries to keep you from being all you can be, in order to validate his own futility and his own miserable, negative existence.
      Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum in 1905, in St. Petersburg. From Russian Jewish and middle-class parentage, she grew up and majored in history at college. She loved Victor Hugo as a writer, Aristotle as philosopher. She aspired to be both a great writer and a great philosopher, but this was not possible in the nation of her birth. She would emigrate to America in 1926 through connections with relatives in Chicago, after her mother sold jewelry to buy her daughter's passage. Rand wound up as an extra in movies directed by Cecil B. DeMille in Hollywood, and she started to write screenplays in English. Through childhood and early adulthood, Rand had shared with her family the horrors of everyday life in Stalinist Russia and knew she would never return. Rand's outspokenness would have endangered her life in Russia, and it might still have endangered her family living there. So Rand changed her name to Ayn Rand from Alice Rosenbaum to protect her family, as well as to secure the unabashed creative and intellectual freedom she craved. In 1929 Rand fell in love and married actor/artist Frank O'Connor, a union that lasted more than fifty years until Frank passed away.
      Rand stated that she became an American by choice, because America was everything Communist Russia was not: optimistic, can-do, achievement oriented, benevolent. Of course, New York was the quintessential symbol of Rand's America, and the skyscraper was the quintessential symbol of New York. What is a skyscraper, but one of the greatest of human material achievements-metaphysically, the reaching higher of man from the earth? It would be interesting to know what Ayn Rand would say about the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center and this country's subsequent War on Terrorism. Likely, she would support a most aggressive military and domestic campaign against terrorism. Rand was certainly no peacenik; indeed, she subscribed to circumscription of civil liberties, in order to fight Communism. Rand was always an advocate of reason over mysticism and irrationalism. She would probably say that it is supremely rational to destroy terrorism at its very root. Like the Communists, terrorists try to infiltrate and to sabotage the United States and to destroy our way of life. Rand was clear that this country was justified to do anything necessary to stop the Communists. Terrorism, as an expression of radical, political Islam, is as much a threat today as Communism once was. It isn't just a case of differing opinions; rather, it is a matter of life and death to all Americans. Rand would also say, that "capitalism demands the best of every man, [namely] his rationality-and rewards him accordingly."
      Ayn Rand, a self-professed atheist, died 6 March, 1982. I pray God has mercy on her soul. For while she did not conceive of the universe correctly, or at least in the spiritual terms the way Christians do, she did render the material world and human beings far more understandable in her work. Her lucid prose and logical arguments give us the tools of understanding we need to make the world more humane, as well as safe from the ravages of an evil, collectively motivated destroyer (the devil by any name). Rand's main interest and purpose was consistently "to define and to present the image of an ideal man, the specific and concrete image of what man can be and ought to be." Of course, she could have found it first in Genesis. She said her one religion was "the sublime in human nature." In substance, that isn't far from what religionists believe. That's why even men and women of faith find so much of the good in her writings. We can agree with her, if referring to the image and likeness of God that, "There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest type of man possible." (Had she only known, His name is Jesus Christ).