A program of study...

When my daughter (Brown '11) and her boyfriend exchanged favorite books, and his turned out to be The Fountainhead, I decided to re-read this not-quite-guilty pleasure of my own teen and college years---though it was not as solid a favorite as Atlas Shrugged, which is almost the longest book I have read twice (that would be A Suitable Boy).

More later, but for now: I enjoy Rand enormously as an ideological pulp writer but have never been an acolyte. It doesn't strike me as a problem that her Social Darwinist/Libertarian "Fourth Way" doesn't work for me as a realistic prescriptive program. She is right about too many other things along the way for this to be much of a concern. She defined the tone of her own fiction as "Romantic Realism" and its aim as "the projection of the ideal man as an end in himself." It isn't a mixed and muddled view of man as he is---much less a kitchen sink wallow with man at his depressive worst. And what a relief that is! We have way too to much of that stuff already.

It could also be argued that Rand was a gifted, even prescient satirist. As I recall my left-intellectual mother was particularly offended by The Fountainhead's portrait of the manipulative left-intellectual architecture critic Ellsworth M. Toohey (missed a trick there; why not middle initial "P"?), which mom considered cartoonishly unrealistic---as if that was incompatible with an element of truth. From our post-deconstruction vantage point it's fun to imagine some of Toohey's more extreme pronouncements getting worked up into full-dress Cultural Studies essays for scholarly journals, in the spirit of the delicious Lingua Franca hoax:

"Personal love, Peter, is a great evil---as everything personal. And it always leads to misery. Don't you see why? Personal love is an act of discrimination, of preference. It is an act of injustice---to every human being on earth whom you rob of the affection arbitrarily granted to one. You must love all men equally."

I've also enjoyed a element I had forgotten, the backstory given to Hearst/Kane-style tabloid newspaper baron Gail Wynand, as a Gangs of New York teenage thug in Hell's Kitchen c. 1895, battling arch rivals The Plug Uglies. The editorial philosophy of Wynand's flagship paper, the Banner, looks ahead to the rub-their-noses-in-it ethos of today's celebrity sleazies:

"It overstressed the glamour of society---and presented society news with a subtle sneer. This gave the man on the street two satisfactions: that of entering illustrious drawing rooms and that of not wiping his feet on the threshold. The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers' brain power. Its enormous headlines, glaring pictures and over-simplified text hit the senses and entered men's consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion."

(Rand is remarkably good at expressing disgust, especially when describing bad writing:

Sentences like used chewing gum, chewed and rechewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain...)

Recently I pulled out a long-borrowed copy of The Conservative Mind, in order to finally read a detailed overview and perhaps determine if I actually am one. But I haven't made much headway; it's one of those exhaustive "First the earth cooled" histories. A few more preliminary steps remain to be taken before I can wade into waters that deep.

I hardly ever buy and read the big official conservative bestsellers. Anne Coulter's Godless was the last, because from what I had heard it touched on some issues that were of direct personal concern, such as the rise of militant atheism and religious intolerance. (The book turned out to be not quite what I expected, though still interesting: a mostly persuasive depiction of liberalism as a secular religion.)

Another book that interested me on the basis of its advance buzz was Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. This is part of the official description of the book on Amazon:

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities-where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

I wrote a few years ago about some "personal concerns" that seem to apply here:

As Stanley Hauerwas says, 'politics names the order of disguised violence.' This suggests an interesting angle on the comments of film scholar Noel Carroll quoted below, questioning the familiar notion that 'everything is political:'One way to interpret this assertion is as an intellectual power grab, a way to claim jurisdiction over the subject under discussion. As a child of radical socialist parents, who participated in most of the big marches of the 1960s and even spent a summer as a CIT at Camp Ahimsa, the Summerhill-ian youth camp run by the CNVA (the Committee for Non-Violent Action), I saw first hand how the 800-pound-gorillas of the Movement used the purity of their committment as a weapon to browbeat potential rivals.So I've been convinced for years that a hunger for personal power lies behind a lot the high-minded talk we hear about 'community' and 'consensus,' like that currently emanating from the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church in America, as manifested in various RCIA and Liturgy Council meetings I've witnessed. A dead giveaway was the assurance that prayer wouldn't work unless all the Children of God did it the same way. (People who dared to kneel were berated from the pulpit.) Rule by consensus creates a fertile field for domination by the most powerful personality in the room. That this is in itself a form of violence, and an interesting covert twist on Social Darwinism, is rarely acknowledged. 'Everything is political' is a strategy that has metastasized into a first principle for ideological bullies. I say it's spinach.

Whether this will prove to be enough to pull me through all 400-plus pages of Liberal F. remains to be seen...