I’m currently reading Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, and it is so refreshing to read an Objectivist writer who doesn’t try to emulate Rand’s own writing style. Too many Objectivist writers—particularly in The Objectivist or The Objectivist Forum—imitate Rand’s voice to a stifling degree, even to the point of using very outdated cliches (who today even knows what a “package deal” even is? Or a “bromide”?). At its best, Rand’s nonfiction style is powerful and precise, both intelligent and emotional, which has the effect of explaining why certain abstract issues are immediately important to human life. At her worst, Rand could mix metaphors confusingly and obscure important logical connections with her rhetoric. One disturbing side effect of this is that it turns off readers who really do approach Rand with an open mind but are deterred by an angry tone that they cannot understand because they don’t know the intellectual arguments behind them. An honest person who has grown up surrounded by the assumption that selfishness is evil is far more likely to be scared away by angry denunciations of altruism than to be intrigued into reading further and coming to an intellectual understanding of why self-sacrifice is wrong.
And if Rand herself occasionally fell into this, it is much worse among those writers whose work is of lesser stature. Particularly troubling is that when done so badly, emotionalistic terminology makes a writer sound like he or she has something to hide, or is afraid of being attacked and is therefore using such terminology as a preemptive defense tactic.
Smith writes with a refreshingly straightforward and intellectual style; an academic candor that is not ashamed to stand up in an intellectual forum and state her reasons. She is respectable and polite, without sacrificing the integrity of her thought. Here’s a sentence picked almost at random: “What is mistaken about most of the attitudes and practices commonly labeled ‘selfish’ is not the pursuit of what is good for oneself but warped ideas of what a person’s self-interest is and of how he can truly serve it.” How refreshingly calm! A person imitating Rand’s style, of course, would have been unable to resist the phrase “whim worship.”
Second, I love the fact that Smith relies upon contemporary philosophical writings. It’s tragic, really, that Objectivist writers have often had such a confrontational attitude with the modern academy that they do not familiarize themselves with, or cite, the work of living philosophers. But as Rand herself said, “it is trash, but you don’t know it.” Objectivists only make themselves less convincing, less relevant, and more insular by closing their eyes to contemporary work and acting like none of it is important or like none of it has any redeeming features. They do themselves an even greater disservice when they refuse to rely on work by scholars who may not be card carrying Objectivists* but who have a great deal in common with and a great deal of sympathy for, Objectivism—people like Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, and Tibor Machan. Smith is the first Objectivist writer in the ARI camp to cite these writers (although unfortunately she still seems unfamiliar with, or at least does not cite, their best work). It’s embarrassing to see it as a positive trend that a scholar is willing to cite other people’s work in the field, but that’s the case with Smith. I don’t mean to say that she’s the first ever to mention sympathetic non-Objectivists; Binswanger and some others have, sometimes. But Smith is much better about it, and that’s delightful.
As someone who would really like to see Objectivism taken more seriously in the philosophical community, I am really pleased to see Smith’s work taking the steps necessary. I hope there will be more like her and more of her work in the future.
*—Even worse, to my mind, is the refusal of ARI-affiliated scholars to acknowledge the work of those Objectivists who have been cast out for one reason or another. Take David Kelley’s The Evidence of The Senses, for example. Here is a work that is entirely Objectivist, produced (at least much of it) in cooperation with Leonard Peikoff himself. Or Branden’s The Psychology of Self Esteem, which was produced under Rand’s own supervision. ARI scholars don’t use these books, and the ARI bookstore won’t sell them. Why not? Because Kelley went on to endorse views ARI doesn’t hold, and because of Branden’s break with Rand? But they sell Victor Hugo, who was a socialist for christsake, and Isabel Paterson, whom Rand also broke with! That’s shameful, in my view. Even if ARI is right in their opposition to Branden and Kelley in their later work, it’s just not intellectually honest to ignore their earlier publications.
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