(One of these days I'll get back to typecasting.)
So I finally read The Fountainhead.
I stayed up past 1 in the morning to finish it, and in fact I even
cried at several points throughout. I want to buy my own copy of it
and underline passages and write all sorts of things in the margins.
This book has been
staring at me for about 20 years from library shelves, mostly through
the editions with Art Deco covers. Those were terrifying Apollonian
arrows pointing to a destiny that I put off for too long (like Thomas
Pynchon, but that's another story). So finally I checked out a copy
from the local library and got sucked in. Today, a day after reading
it, I wrote the following.
Producers and parasites. In the
Fountainhead Ayn Rand shows
(somewhat melodramatically, but that isn't a bad thing) model
characters or characters as models of these principal types in their
purity. I find myself unable to dispute the core of the principles
in their purity, but what I think is the cause for worry about Rand
isn't the truth in the “selfishness” that is essential to every
individual soul (and I want to write more about that, also parse
Lehi's “men are that they might have joy” in relation to this),
nor is it the core principle of whether one produces or not. Of
course in real life when one person produces something and the rest
of us benefit. I think of Robert Fripp's words: “Music so wishes
to be heard that it calls on some to give it a voice and some to give
it ears.” Civilization has been around long enough to make the
manifestations of these principles – in pure and perverted forms –
so complex that applying them to real-life situations entails doing
everything you can to trace each economic interaction and relation
back to its roots. This is why mainstream partisan politics are so
dissatisfying, and why TV news and talk radio are such dismal ways to
try to be informed about what's going on in the world and what you
can do about it. This is also why parlor politics rarely if ever
gets beyond a ritualistic bashing of everyone's favorite imagined
villains, backed up with appeals to everyone's favorite authorities.
I've
certainly seen Ayn Rand cast as a villain, a Korihor-like prophetess
of greed and callousness. In the purity of her concepts, I accept
that she wasn't advocating racism nor greed for money and power (at
least not in The Fountainhead).
On the contrary, she exposed those as betrayals of self, mere
variations of “second-handedness.” So why does she get such a
bad reputation? I haven't studied her Objectivist philosophy, so I
don't know what else she wrote that attracted such ire, but I intuit
the following scenario repeating countless times: a man goes out and
makes a load of money in some business, reads Rand, and then says:
look, I have made stuff, employed people, ergo I'm a producer. How
many people completely miss the lesson of Gail Wynand? How easy it
is to assume that the producers in society are not just the
entrepreneurs (which is already too narrow) but the ones who have
become wealthy. And how easy it is to use the label “parasite”
as a politically correct
justification for dismissing any concern or basic human empathy or at
least rational consideration of whole swaths of people. Are they the
ones making the money, making the jobs? Are they among the few, the
proud captains of industry? No? Are they in misfortune, are they
(or do we see them as) dependent on any kind of assistance? Do they
have the impudence to procreate without having steady means of their
own self-sufficient heroic make to support them materially (according
to our standard of living)? Yes? Why then they're parasites.
Q.E.D. And we don't have to worry that we're being racist by going
along with the wink-wink nudge-nudge because Rand (or whoever) Said,
so we're absolved of any effect our actions have of perpetuating
collectivist oppression. Of course we'll put ourselves in the camp
of producers as we whine in our parlor talk or radio call-ins or at
the voting booth, even if we're working at jobs we don't really want,
even if our political involvement is really an attempt to prop up
some sense of meaning in our desperate lives, because we think we Get
It. It's so easy to slip into this.
If
there are people living in poverty we don't have to cathect to our
images of them in a show of pity and meddlesome “charity,” but
neither do we have to dismiss them as feckless failures because
they're not all independent workers (though what if we all could
be?), with the gumption to stick with their work through the tough
times without complaint, facing the world alone like Roark did until
enough of us finally come around to reward their contributions
(through fair media of exchange that might not be available, which we
might not want to admit).
Everyone
is born with their own gift to give to the world, and some are more
prominent than others (after reading The Fountainhead
I feel I now accept the parable of the talents better, and have a new
appreciation for Alma's mission to the Zoramites too), but it has to
be remembered and acknowledged that the forces that so stifled the
gifts of the producers included entrenched money interests,
impersonal boards of directors and other features of the capitalist
system. How easy it still is for second-handers at the helms of
powerful corporations to cravenly claim that they are the real
producers, while continuing to suffocate the world under mediocrity.
It's no longer drippy Progressive preaching of self-sacrifice, it's
brazen praise for “self-interest,” meaning the appetites and
dictates of false, non-individuating selves: blind egos, contemptuous
introjects, unacknowledged complexes, possessive archetypes – but
not the true soul of every Self. A lazy appropriation of the terms
of “self-interest” and “selfishness” makes it so easy to fall
back into the conventional semantics that Rand took so much trouble
to take apart that I wonder if it was worth her trouble and she might
as well have coined a new term.
For a similar
reason I currently have no interest in Objectivism as a philosophical
system, because it still stinks to me of Intellectual Property, which
I don't believe in. Looking briefly at the character of Roark: there
is no need to impose a fiction of “intellectual property” on the
architectural designs of someone with such a unique vision. If
someone were to copy one of his buildings it would be imitation as
tribute, flattery or incompetent servility – but it would not be
theft. It means much that Rand includes the dialogue about
individual private ownerships of our experiences with the world:
Roark owns his buildings irrevocably, but so do those who use them or
even see them, each in their own inviolate way. For Roark to act
like too many so-called libertarians do, he would have to post guards
outside all of his buildings to charge fees for walking in or even
looking at them.
This
has to do also with the struggle I've long had with reading or
talking about philosophy. I like reading about it, and about
psychology, and I don't dispute giving credit where due. But I
return often to the words of Montaigne (in translation): “Truth and
reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them
first, than his who speaks them after: 'tis no more according to
Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and
understand them.” (Essays
Chapter XXV “Of the Education of Children” trans. Charles Cotton)
Even Howard Roark,
who others see as cold and antisocial, takes for granted that if you
saw a drowning man you would try to rescue him. It means a lot that
in connection with this, when the young Gail Wynand is crawling along
the sidewalk after being beaten nearly to death, the one person he
asks for help dismisses him in “bovine indifference.” That
adjective is important, because it is certainly an inhuman act to be
so callous towards a fellow being. Rand showed this here and I'm
glad to have read the book in order to have seen her acknowledgment
of this truth.
Even so, the
fact that she spent so much effort justifying her unorthodox use of
phrases like “self-interest” and “selfishness” might not be enough to defeat this danger: the
bare words stick in minds when their substance has ebbed, and then
people are quick to attribute the conventional meanings to them and
justify their inhumanity by the same kind of servility to a creed,
this time a secular one: Rand – or whoever – Says. It is the
exact same phenomenon as “the Scriptures say.” Any such vague
appeals to authority should immediately put your internal radar on
the alert. I can't help but think of the parable of the Samaritan
when I read that episode in Wynand's youth, and I don't know if Rand
had it in mind, but I'm glad she didn't have the scene take place at
the door of a church, with a reverend wrinkling his nose at the human
trash importuning him and slamming the door. Whether Rand meant to
or not, she shows respect to Jesus' parable here, by letting it stand
as a definitive statement of how religion so often leads people to do
evil. She respected the parable by rounding it out, and showing how
the betrayal of self which leads to such callousness can come from
other sources besides religion.
The
bar-keeper's refusal to help the young gangster is a betrayal of
himself. It seems like selfishness and most of us would describe it
as such, but it's the same kind of second-handedness that the young
victim swallows and which sets him off on his meteoric rise to power.
In refusing to help a young man nearly dead at his doorstep, the
barkeeper is not listening to his human self in recognition of
another human self, he is listening to the blindness of an ego that
pits itself against others, that judges the worth of souls according
to criteria inherited and accepted from others without question:
gangsters, street trash, worthless. This is the turning point in
Gail's life, when his refusal to accept incompetence fermented into
his resolve to rule. Who knows what his career might have looked
like if he hadn't started it out with such a foundation, and if
whatever enterprise he began allowed room for other producers to work
within it true to themselves? Do I mean something like Silicon
Valley? Well, what would it take for such conditions to flourish and
purify all over, not just in such pockets of privilege? I find
answers to that question in E.F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Kevin
Carson and others. For one thing, you can't get there with so much
of human knowledge and invention locked up in copyrights and patents.
My working
hypothesis is that most of the wealthy businessmen who are so adored
by conservatives and so-called libertarians are more like Gail Wynand
than Howard Roark. I wonder what kind of world we would have if half
of them had the courage to make the kind of restitution that Wynand
makes at the end of the book. Are Carnegie libraries enough?
One of the
features in Roark's design that makes him so pure is that while those
around him see him as a hero struggling against the world, he
doesn't. He refuses to accept the charge of defiance that others try
to pin on him, or even to feel the resentment that others feel in his
behalf. He doesn't do his work out of defiance (as Wynand does), he
does his work because he has to. When his first buildings go up, he
faces accusations of faddishness, willful whimsy – the kind of
thing that has put up monstrosities like the Information ScienceBuilding at the University of Pittsburgh. But through the book, it
is evident that his love for buildings is inextricably linked with
human empathy: he designs buildings with the consideration of what it
will be like to inhabit them. The concern for others may be
unconscious but is none the less powerful for that – in fact it may
be its unconsciousness that makes it so effective. After Roark
finishes the Heller house, his client says “You were very
considerate of me.” Roark replies: “I haven't thought of you at
all. I thought of the house. . . . Perhaps that's why I knew how to
be considerate of you.”
One of the bits
that brought tears to my eyes was where he sat with Dominique
watching one of his buildings go up – a humble five-story store in
an insignificant Midwestern town – and she expresses misguided
sorrow at seeing such a brilliant architect stuck doing such
insignificant buildings. He points out that it doesn't matter: he
loves each building for its own sake. In fact, it bugged me, reading
the book, that his Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit is built so
close to the earth, at such a human scale, as opposed to the
intimidating grandeur of religious buildings throughout history which
always tried to make people feel small and despicable (and there my
straw man alert sounded the loudest of any point in the book), yet of
course Rand has to have her characters gush about skyscrapers. And
of course she also takes pains to qualify how skyscrapers don't make
Wynand feel small but give him a sense of the “heroic in man.”
What if the Stoddard Temple had been a tall skyscraper then?
When
I read the part about the Stoddard Temple I thought of one of my
Humanities teachers talking about Gothic cathedrals: their uplifting
effect on the spirit as opposed to the intimidation of the older
Romanesque buildings. Stepping into a Gothic cathedral, he said, is
like getting on board a spaceship. (And it's interesting how Gothic
architecture gets such scant mention in the novel.) I think I have
come to respect skyscrapers in the way that Camille Paglia respects
religion, but I'd still prefer a Gothic cathedral, or something like
Simon and Jasmine Dale
build – or Jung's Bollingen
Tower. There's a
temple of the human spirit for you!
The
triumphant ending of The Fountainhead
brought tears to my eyes, but it wasn't because the Wynand Building
was the tallest on the earth. For me, Roark's greatest triumph is
Monadnock Valley. That triumph flows from an explicit empathy for a
human need, as Roark himself expresses in his presentation to the
developers. By doing his work he has performed a true service to his
fellow beings. So when later he lectures Peter Keating about how his
design of Cortlandt Homes won't be motivated by concern for the poor
slum-dwellers, I know what Rand means, and I accept that she felt the
need to clear away the fog of Progressive sentimentality that
surrounded her when she wrote. But it still reflects the truth that
when you do find your own life's work and purpose, and are true to
it, you inevitably benefit others – and I affirm the rightness of
rejoicing in that and calling to that, even as I agree that boasting
of it and taking it up as a sign of superiority over others corrupts
it.
I
choose to take as a sign of maturity that when I read the portrayals
of sentimental praise for “the common man” in The
Fountainhead, I didn't so much
protest with the youthful idealism I might have once had – hey
what's wrong with the common man? – but I reflected on the
soul-sucking effects of state-imposed
mass instruction, standardized testing and Common Core standards
(which of course award lucrative contracts to a few winning business
interests – are those people then Producers? Hell no!). I thought
of an editorial by a retired teacher: “Please
widen achievement gaps.” I thought of Sudbury Valley School
and its dedication to democratic order which produces uncommon
people, of Daniel Greenberg's statement that a right to vote is
meaningless without mutual respect, of the self-fulfilling fear of
mob rule by those who exercise their right to vote without exercising
their brains.
“You
are unique – just like everyone else.” “If everyone's special,
no one is.” Such sarcasm is, to quote Jung, “the prerogative of
habitual grumblers with bad digestions” (“Psychology and
Religion” trans. R.F.C. Hull, Collected Works
vol. 11, p. 105). Take time to reflect and to imagine what a world
might look like where everyone really was equal in their right and
opportunity to be unique. Let that dissolve the justifications
you've accepted of everything that chokes such individuality – not
only prevailing fashions in dress and so on, but the political and
economic structures that support those who arrogate to themselves the
undeserved title of Producers and betray themselves in imposing their
mediocrity on the rest of us with state-backed protections of their
so-called property.
Ayn Rand might
turn in her grave, but she is in agreement with Alma the younger in
this: the outrage and impatience that come from seeing just how badly
the world is run, how much individual human potential is wasted,
should not be taken as an excuse to hate, but should strengthen the
resolve of each of us to dedicate ourselves to the growth of our
individual souls. Alma's tree metaphor (like that of the wise and
foolish virgins) is self-centered in that way: you are the only one
who can grow that tree, and you are the only one who can eat of its
fruit.
So now I wonder if
I'll go find out who John Galt is.
Also I have to
wonder if Blixa Bargeld or any of his bandmates ever read the book.
