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Random outings

The first fewpages into American writer Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, I realised I couldn’t do it. This rejection was in spite of her great popularity amongst urban Indians then and now and not all of them just 17 as I was then.

The protagonist, Howard Roark, had rectangular eyes. I pictured this poor man with his vertically rectangular eyes, like something out of the British science fiction television series for children, Dr Who.

All Rand’s lectures about the unembellished style of modern architecture and why it was better than florid and over-flourished buildings went to waste. Bad writing could not be a good enough carrier for apparently special philosophical thought.

Rumours said that Roark was based on the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand later clarified that all she had borrowed was Wright’s architectural principles — not his personality or his life — to make her point, which developed into objectivism.

Roark was a humourless, rectangular-eyed man who lived only to propagate the purity of his craft. Wright was larger than life and basked in public adoration — nothing like his supposed fictional alter ego. He apparently ignored her requests for an interview but, typically, was flattered when the book came out.

It was the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged that made Rand a legend in her own lifetime. Since then, scores of humourless, fervent and possibly rectangular-eyed men and women have been obsessed with her philosophy.

Rand said of the book in an afterword, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

This has been seen as some sort of a vindication — celebration is too frivolous a word for irony-free passionate objectivist zealots — of the capitalist idea. Little wonder that even today, the world’s foremost capitalists in corporate environs admire Rand.

That is fine as far as it goes, but it was somewhat frightening to learn that recently a few armtwisted some American universities to include Rand’s texts in their syllabi. Rand’s writings arenot considered literature and the appeal of her philosophy is limited, so by academic standards this corporate condition in return for big buck donations is unsettling.

It is true that university courses are less classical or hi-falutin’ than before but the idea here is to study human history through popular culture, not bad texts. Rand ought to be read but off-campus, like a necessary pill that prepares you for life as long as you don’t take it too seriously. She was a bit strange too.

By some accounts, she forced people into marriage because she misunderstood their lack of interest as “irrational” and then forced them into affairs with her so that they could have “rational love affairs”.

Her simplistic objectivism is made up of absolutes and sadly, like what happened to Howard Roark’s rectangular eyes and me, such statements made without any doubt and devoid of nuance are bound to go very wrong.

Rand is loved in America — if not academia — because of her hatred of Communism, based on her earlier life in Communist Russia. But Rand’s objectivism is no less fascist in its insistence on reason being absolute.

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal said, ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”, which is an idea that everyone who lives in the real world — and has a heart — will understand. Rand fans of course belong to another world. Where ultra-rational beings have rectangular eyes and lot of money to make sure they get their way.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net