WHY AYN RAND WAS A NOVELIST: Because reason ain’t gonna define itself!

The ever-interesting Krubner replies to my post on the inability of abstractions to serve as standards of value.

He writes, “People die for the flag, they die for their nation, they die for the family, they die for the Land, they’ve been known to tree-sit for a month and then die for the Earth. People have died because they were unwilling to sign loyalty oaths, and they were unwilling to sign because they felt loyal to the abstract ideal of freedom of the human spirit.”

Here is a perhaps overly-brief reply: People often think they are acting in accordance with some abstract ideal! But when it comes time to define that ideal–when there are conflicts over the meaning and requirements of the ideal (what should the dictatorship of the proletariat look like? how do I know what love is?)–something else happens:

a) People go with prevailing cultural definitions.

b) People look to heroes, figures who serve the godlike function of giving meaning and surprise/correction to their ideals. This is why Ayn Rand was so wise to write novels: She needed not just descriptions of reason, but depictions of Roark and Galt actually living out her ideals. She needed saints. (This is what I got from Reflections on the Revolution in France: Marie Antoinette serves as a national symbol, giving the country a face, making the country like a person, and thus making it a possible object of loyalty. Traditions generally serve the same functions for an institution.)

c) People twist (or, less judgmentally, “adapt”) their ideals to serve their own wants.

All of these are natural, inescapable, and often good human impulses (the urge to admire, for example). People who hold to particular belief systems owe it to themselves and to others to work with these human urges: to praise people who act heroically, or create art in which people act right; to shape cultural definitions; to educate children so that their desires are more likely to be in accordance with what is right. But I hope these impulses’ limitations as standards for ethical conduct are obvious. When you are trying to figure out what is true, you can’t rely on these definitions from within the culture; something–Someone–must enter from outside.

I also can’t say I rightly see how Shakespeare is a humanist–at least not in the sense of thinking that “being merely human, after all, is a fantastic thing in itself.” The Swan of Avon was supercagey about which worldview, of the many displayed in his works, he actually believed; but in many of them he goes radically against this particular position. Hamlet is God-haunted, trapped between fatalism and salvation; Lear is Larkin’s “Aubade” at the decibel level of Philip Roth; Macbeth is a condemnation, Measure for Measure a horror burlesque, Richard II and Richard III both pictures of the immense littleness of the human self, and even what Harold Bloom calls “the Falstaffiad” is ambivalent, at best, about the Ultimate Value of Humankind As Such. Probably you could make the best case for Much Ado About Nothing… although I wonder what the title does for that question. Or, wait, A Midsummer Night’s Dream might do you for, also. But certainly not Shakespeare’s works as a whole. IMO.

“For I am sure that no man asketh mercy and grace with true meaning, but if mercy and grace be first given to him.”

–Julian of Norwich