Smokin’ hot essay in this month’s GQ by John Ritter on Ayn Rand’s influence on college students, bankers, financiers, chairmen of the Federal Reserve, and other people who need to have their certainties smacked out of them from time to time for the good of the rest of us.  I know, because I used to be one of them…

A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible…

Sort of.  Not everyone likes thinking of themselves as misunderstood.  I sure didn’t.  But I never blamed being taken for a weird little geek on being misunderstood because I knew I was one.  Being raised in a Baptist household the first person you always blame for just about everything, let alone not fitting in, is yourself.  

It was after leaving my church and coming out to myself as gay that I first read Rand.  But in retrospect, clearly, all those days spent in church listening to fire and brimstone pulpit thumping had left their mark on me.  I craved moral certainty, and admired the firebrand moralist who spoke to those certainties.  If I have a weakness to this day that’s it.  But at 20 the bible had long since lost its power as a moral instrument.  It was still interesting in its echo from a distant time kinda way, but no longer authoritative.  I wandered aimlessly in a kind of existential stupor, unwilling to rest my moral values on religious absolutes that I knew perfectly well were nothing more then the bar stool prejudices of various pulpit thumpers, but unable to find another moral compass to guide my way.  Reason and morality it seemed, were two different things.

Two books shook me out of my moral fog then, almost one after the other.  In retrospect, both were terribly flawed teachers.  And yet they left me with concepts I still value to this day.  The first was Robert Audrey’s African Genesis.  I found a tattered copy of it in a corner of a warehouse I once worked in, wrinkled and discarded, and picking it up and reading the first page of it…

Not in innocence, and not in Asia was mankind born… 

…I had to take the thing home.  I absolutely devoured it.  And from Audry I gleaned the idea that the forces that move within our consciousness actually are understandable and manageable…but only if we seriously study our evolutionary past.  To construct workable human societies, and moral codes that actually and really benefit us, we need to undertake an almost brutal, unromantic, understanding of ourselves and that means looking also to the past which brought us forth.  Not to do so would be akin to trying to build a bridge with no understanding of the nature of the materials you’re constructing it from…

We are not so unique as we would like to believe.  And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.

Yes.  Yes.  And Yes.  I still passionately believe this is true.  Let it be said that a lot of naturalists and anthropologists really hate Audrey for his overwrought image of humans as killer apes.  But you can discard that part of it…our understanding of the human ancestors is much improved since he wrote that book…and still respect the basic idea.  We are, each of us, in body and consciousness, living histories of millions of years of life on earth.  To make a better life for ourselves in the here and now, we need to understand that history.

The second book was Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  As John Ritter writes…

The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent…  One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.

Well…kind of.  I never thought of my friends as idiots.  But I suspect I did turn into a bit of a jerk because that’s what happens to people when they become True Believers.  Suddenly everything made sense!  The world was powered by the rational human intellect!  Everything that denied the mind was anti-life!  Capitalism wasn’t merely the most productive economic system ever invented, it was the only Moral one!  To take possession of your own life and live it for the good of your Self was the highest virtue!  Here was an ideology that appealed to my inner geek and my inner pulpit thumper both.  I am certain there was a period in my life when I couldn’t speak two words without going off about Randian ideology.  It’s amazing I still have friends from that period.

People wonder how it is that so many gays become Randians since Rand herself was a vitriolic homophobe.  But Rand’s morality of sex, that enjoying sex for its own sake was not only moral, but was morally validated by a couple’s mutual pleasure in each other’s bodies, is very appealing to a people who are taught to feel ashamed of any hint of sexual desire in themselves the moment puberty hits them.  I saw Rand’s morality as a reasoned and high minded rejection of the notion of original sin drilled into me all throughout my Baptist childhood, that our bodies, that our feelings of sexual desire, were evidence of humanity’s fallen state.  And it seemed to validate any sexual relationship, gay or straight, that sprang from mutual appreciation of the best within each other, body and soul. Rand declared that sexual joy for its own sake, taken between two people who wholeheartedly and completely desire each other was a righteous thing.  And a lot of gay people, myself included, said ‘Amen!’

But therein, for me at least, lay the seeds of discontent as well.  Rand taught that human emotions were the unconscious sum of the workings of our rational mind.  This led her to view homosexuality as the result of bad thinking…faulty premises as she liked to put everything that didn’t fit into her philosophy.  It led her acolyte and lover Nathanial Brandon to suggest in one essay that gay men were gay because they’d been subconsciously made afraid of women from being taught to idealize them but not desire them.  Huh?  As any gay person knows, and especially any gay person who ever tried to psychoanalyze themselves straight, your sexual orientation isn’t something you think yourself into.  Or out of.  And here was Rand and her "collective" dispensing pop psychology crap about homosexuality that not only gay folk themselves, but actual researchers, had known for decades was claptrap.  We don’t think ourselves into our sexual orientations, they just are.  But that kind of thinking about human consciousness was anathema to Rand.

How I managed to embrace an ideology that regarded human consciousness as entirely the province of the rational mind after reading and embracing Audrey I cannot explain.  But there it was.  Eventually the ideas I gleaned from Audrey did come back to me.  I think it was while reading a statement of Rand’s that she was neither a supporter nor denier of the theory of evolution.  Well of course, because evolution throws a great big monkey wrench into her model of human consciousness which acknowledged only the human capacity for rational thinking.  Rand’s human being was every bit the separate creation that Adam was in Genesis.  And that is not what a human being is.  The moment I read her statement on evolution it got me to thinking about all the other ways I’d had to forgive Rand for making pronouncements about this and that which just seemed…well…stupid. 

And that was how I found my way out the door to her church.  The one thing I took from her that I still keep close to my heart to this day is the idea that morality must be reason-based.  It must withstand the test of truth, conform to the evidence, logically and objectively work to benefit our lives.  Oh that Rand herself had held to this idea, when championing her notion that unfettered capitialism is the only moral system. 

Unfortunately…for all of us…she didn’t.  And neither have her intellectual heirs…

This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year’s Physicians’ Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an Ayn Rand Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It’s metastasized. You, me, all of us, we’re living it. Because it’s the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.

Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere—as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.

Reading Ritter’s GQ essay gave me a feeling (yes Ayn…a Feeling…) reminiscent of that moment gay folk experience when they discover they’re not the only ones like themselves.  Well…if even Alan Greenspan can admit now, while standing there in the center of the wreakage of our ecomony, that perhaps he was wrong about all that deregulation stuff, maybe we’ll see some other big names come out of the closet as ex-Randian.  We could be in for lots more fun denunciations of Randian claptrap. 

There is a third book I discovered well after Audrey and Rand, which I still hold dear to my heart.  Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values.  Bronowski clarified for me how knowledge, being a Process of discovery and refinement of models, was also at its core a deeply personal and creative act.  He brought me to an understanding I really needed, about how the work of both scientists and artists had the same creative root, thereby bringing my inner techno geek and my inner art geek finally to some degree of peace with one another.  But more importantly, he showed me how to get past my need for certainty.  There is no perfect God’s eye view to be found, either in the bible or in Atlas Shrugged.  Our knowledge exists in an area of imprecision we can never fully eliminate.  Call it the Uncertainty Principal or, as Brownoski suggested in The Ascent of Man, the Principal of Tolerance if you like, but there is no God’s eye view.  Quantum physics has proven that literally.  But that does not mean we can never really know anything.  It means we have to always bear in mind that area of uncertianty always tied up in our understandings, and that knowledge is a process of test and refinement, and not a thing we can safely stop questioning.  We have to always take care to ask ourselves what we know, and how we know it.  Always.

If I had to point to one thing that sums Rand up in her entirety for me it would be this:  She wrote in Atlas Shrugged, "I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand.  FIRE, a dangerous force, tamed at his finger tips.  I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come out from such hours. When a man thinks there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."  Thereby turning cigarettes into a symbol for fans of her and her philosophy.  It is a beautiful, eloquant image…the act of thinking, the hand holding fire.  In 1974 Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer, quit smoking at that time, and never once for the rest of her life warned her readers about the dangers of cigarettes.  When someone gives you, the artist, their love wholeheartedly, you need to love them back.

Go read the whole thing.