Why are Christian Conservatives so bent in including Ayn Rand?

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I think we can read and discern. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Marx, Rand, whoever… I never read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ but I liked the Fountainhead. I read it when I was about 30 and had, oddly enough, never heard of Ayn Rand, so I had no preconceived ideas. I liked it. I thought it was refreshing. Of course, I was (am) impressionable.

I think there is value in reading her books. Do I believe in her philosophy? No. I wouldn’t even call it a philosophy. I’d call it a simplistic train of thought that has been expounded upon to make it look like a philosophy.

I still liked the book and am glad I read it.

Again, if everyone maximized and or optimized their time talent and treasure, virtuously, for the sake of glorifying the Father Son and Holy Spirit, for the sake of fulfilling God’s Will on Earth as it is in Heaven, that would be great. That’s my takeaway from Rand. Maybe not what she intended (unintended consequences?) but, that’s my takeaway.
 
migueltojose said:
I think we can read and discern. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Marx, Rand, whoever… I never read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ but I liked the Fountainhead. I read it when I was about 30 and had, oddly enough, never heard of Ayn Rand, so I had no preconceived ideas. I liked it. I thought it was refreshing. Of course, I was (am) impressionable.

I think there is value in reading her books. Do I believe in her philosophy? No. I wouldn’t even call it a philosophy. I’d call it a simplistic train of thought that has been expounded upon to make it look like a philosophy.

I still liked the book and am glad I read it.

Again, if everyone maximized and or optimized their time talent and treasure, virtuously, for the sake of glorifying the Father Son and Holy Spirit, for the sake of fulfilling God’s Will on Earth as it is in Heaven, that would be great. That’s my takeaway from Rand. Maybe not what she intended (unintended consequences?) but, that’s my takeaway.
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I too liked FH, which was why many years later I picked up AS. Worlds apart!

The difference is, many if not most of us can imagine being someone like Roark in FH; somebody who maximizes their life against the pressure of the general society. But who really wants to be among the millions consumed by the chaos unleashed when a handful of elitists object to not getting their way?

If the modern movements were quoting FH rather than AS, IMNAAHO there would be little if anything to object to and a lot to admire. We SHOULD all maximize our life! But the price of having a society is that we don’t usually get our way, elite or not!

ICXC NIKA
 
GEddie said:
The difference is, many if not most of us can imagine being someone like Roark in FH; somebody who maximizes their life against the pressure of the general society.
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Speak for yourself, Roark was a RAPIST. No thanks. :mad:
 
manualman said:
Speak for yourself, Roark was a RAPIST. No thanks. :mad:
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yeah but the way she wrote it, dominuque knew that roark knew that she really wanted it… in that sense it was consensual rape…

let’s not forget - these aren’t real people - there is no roark - there is an author with a pen…
 
migueltojose said:
yeah but the way she wrote it, dominuque knew that roark knew that she really wanted it… in that sense it was consensual rape…

let’s not forget - these aren’t real people - there is no roark - there is an author with a pen…
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:dts:
 
I read several of her books: Fountainhead, Anthem, Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, The New Left: the Anti-Industrial Revolution, We the Living, For the New Intellectual, and parts of Philosophy: Who Needs It.

It seems like her basic premise is that the government’s sole role is to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Only individuals have these rights, not groups or organizations or corporations. Her economics doesn’t buy into printing money. (Surprise that Greenspan was once her adamant supporter.) But she doesn’t recognize life until actual birth. It seems like the rest of her philosophy falls apart after that.
 
Fiction which portrays “heroic” men who “know” when a woman means yes, when she says NO only helps to perpetuate such despicable behavior in the real world. It really happens more often than you’d like to believe. No means NO, always. No exceptions. No “knowing better.” I have three girls and anybody they date (when they get that old) is going to have to see me polishing a shotgun when they come to pick her up…
 
GEddie said:
Consider that in ATLAS SHRUGGED, she extolled a group of elitists who allowed the society to collapse because it would not let them be as rich as they wished; where is Christuan community in that?
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Actually, what she villainized was government attempts to use legal force to manipulate economy to be “fair”… a practice which resulted in higher prices and reduced consumer care for all. She has no problem with people voluntarily giving to charity, but rather with those who think that they have a right to use legal force to take without choice from others.

Sure, not all of what she said is good… but nonetheless charity cannot be attained by force. At that point, it is not charity, but robbery.
 
Actaeon said:
Actually, what she villainized was government attempts to use legal force to manipulate economy to be “fair”… a practice which resulted in higher prices and reduced consumer care for all. She has no problem with people voluntarily giving to charity, but rather with those who think that they have a right to use legal force to take without choice from others.

Sure, not all of what she said is good… but nonetheless charity cannot be attained by force. At that point, it is not charity, but robbery.
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That doesn’t make any sense. You’re equivocating with the word “charity.” Of course the virtue of charity can’t be required by law. But it is the task of those in authority to provide for the common good. To call provision for the needs of the poor “charity,” equate this popular use of the word with the proper use as the name of a theological virtue, and then conclude triumphantly that since theological virtues can’t be enforced therefore government shouldn’t provide for the poor–this is not even worthy of being called a bad argument. It’s nothing but a childish word game.

Edwin
 
Ridgerunner said:
I claim to be Christian and I’m conservative in some, but not all, ways.

I think there are elements of Rand’s philosophy that are consistent with Christianity, or at least not inconsistent with it.

Rand believed in the free exchange of services and goods. Aquinas maintained that a “just price” is that price at which each party in the exchange values what he gets in the exchange more than what he gives for it.
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Aquinas’s position on just price is not as clear as you’re making it sound. A lot of pro-capitalist Catholics cite the later scholastics and then read them back into Aquinas.

The fundamental problem with Rand, it seems to me, is her individualism. There’s no conception of the common good, which is fundamental to Catholic social teaching. But perhaps I misunderstand her.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
Aquinas’s position on just price is not as clear as you’re making it sound. A lot of pro-capitalist Catholics cite the later scholastics and then read them back into Aquinas.

The fundamental problem with Rand, it seems to me, is her individualism. There’s no conception of the common good, which is fundamental to Catholic social teaching. But perhaps I misunderstand her.

Edwin
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you understand her perfectly well.
 
Contarini said:
That doesn’t make any sense. You’re equivocating with the word “charity.” Of course the virtue of charity can’t be required by law. But it is the task of those in authority to provide for the common good. To call provision for the needs of the poor “charity,” equate this popular use of the word with the proper use as the name of a theological virtue, and then conclude triumphantly that since theological virtues can’t be enforced therefore government shouldn’t provide for the poor–this is not even worthy of being called a bad argument. It’s nothing but a childish word game.

Edwin
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its pretty embarrassing when we have to have one of our separated brethren give the most concise account of the Church’s teaching on social justice. and also at the same time demolish this bogus argument .
 
Actaeon said:
Sure, not all of what she said is good… but nonetheless charity cannot be attained by force. At that point, it is not charity, but robbery.
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I think what Actaeon is saying – and it represents Ayn Rand’s views accurately – is that it is force that she had a problem with, as opposed to questions of what does or doesn’t constitute true charity.

There is force, obviously, in taxation – if you do not pay, you will be imprisoned. It is compulsory. Most of us accept it because we accept that government authority is–by definition–impossible without some degree of force and compulsion, and–at best–you get a return on your investment (well-paved streets; a police and fire department; a standing army).

For Rand, the redistribution of wealth was a form of government coercion that was unacceptable, and that led–in her mind–to the slippery slope of full-blown collectivism, where “coercion” becomes outright violence and brutalization. She experienced that first-hand, in Soviet Russia; she was 12 years old and living in Saint Petersburg, when the Communist Revolution occurred. Her family lost everything (her father having been a pharmacist who owned his own shop).

I personally think her fears were exaggerated as regards “social spending,” though I can see (in principle, at least) the logic of her slippery slope argument as regards government regulation – e.g., “once companies hire employees, they must keep them for at least 5 years”; “if we do this, companies will hire less employees”; “therefore, we must legally *require *them to hire”; “if we do this, more companies will choose to shut down and go out of business, rather than comply”; “therefore, we must require them to stay in business”; “if that is required, the owners of those companies may leave the country”; “therefore, we must require them to stay in the country; they have no right to leave, nor do they have a right to close their business; they are needed here.” This is a very extreme case of what Ayn Rand perceived as the slippery slope of government intervention in the economy but, then again, she lived in a world in which Eastern and Western Europe were separated by a physical wall and a mass of barbed wire, with surveillance by men with machine guns. East Germans were not allowed to leave, because the country needed their talents and their service. Not to say that the country did not express gratitude for the “sacrifice that they were making, on behalf of their brothers.”
 
p.s. from an East German propaganda booklet, published shortly before the building of the Berlin Wall (drawn from wikipedia):

“Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the interests of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity. Those who let themselves be recruited objectively serve West German Reaction and militarism, whether they know it or not. Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a ‘guaranteed future’ one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favours a new war and destruction? Is it not an act of political depravity when citizens, whether young people, workers, or members of the intelligentsia, leave and betray what our people have created through common labour in our republic to offer themselves to the American or British secret services or work for the West German factory owners, Junkers, or militarists? Does not leaving the land of progress for the morass of an historically outdated social order demonstrate political backwardness and blindness? … [W]orkers throughout Germany will demand punishment for those who today leave the German Democratic Republic, the strong bastion of the fight for peace, to serve the deadly enemy of the German people, the imperialists and militarists.”

This is the kind of rhetoric Rand no doubt heard in the wake of the Communist Revolution, and it gave her a deep mistrust of any form of coercion in human affairs. Capitalism, for her, was fundamentally non-coercive and voluntary – the baker doesn’t put a gun to my head and tell me to buy his bread (locking the door behind me, when I enter); nor does the customer put a gun to the head of the baker. It is a voluntary exchange. The factory owner does not put a gun to my head, telling me to work in his factory; nor do I put a gun to the head of the factory owner, telling him to hire me; nor does he put a gun to my head, telling me I can’t quit. Of course, there are other, more subtle forms of coercion – if I am starving, I *might as well *have a gun to my head, in terms of my need to accept, in exchange for back-breaking labor, a salary that is barely enough to subsist on. Rand believed that to speak of “force” or “coercion” in cases of unequal bargaining power was playing with words, and had no tolerance for metaphorical or de facto forms of coercion, since cases of actual coercion (the use of physical force, or the threat of physical force) were all-too-real and manifest.
 
Honestly, most Christians, of all persuasions, do not know who Ayn Rand is; so don’t worry about it.
 
You know while I think the philosophy of the guy that supported allowing babies who were born after botched abortions to be killed and is an anti-colonialist is absolutely insane, I can still find bits and pieces of common ground where I might agree with him. Ayn Rand is a walk in the park in terms of being able to separate the wheat from the chaff compared to him.
 
Speaking as a philosopher-in-training, I can say that the other problem with Ayn Rand is that there’s nothing in there that you couldn’t find said far better and more consistently somewhere else.
 
DarkLight said:
Speaking as a philosopher-in-training, I can say that the other problem with Ayn Rand is that there’s nothing in there that you couldn’t find said far better and more consistently somewhere else.
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well said
 
april32010 said:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

–Kung Fu Monkey
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Too funny!

The point this makes though is that Ayn Rand was a novelist, so I see no reason to think of what she says as any kind of philosophy at all. As a novelist, her writing is pretty awful.
 
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