AYN RAND AND C.S. LEWIS

You might think that there was nothing in common between these two people, and you would be totally correct. After all, Rand has been called the Apostle of Selfishness while Lewis was the Christian Apostle to Intellectuals. This title for Rand was well deserved in that she actually wrote a book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness. She viewed altruism as inherently illogical, and thus, essentially immoral.

At this point, I will have to admit that I have never actually read any of Ayn Rand's novels, although I did manage to stay awake through the 1949 Gary Cooper adaptation of The Fountainhead. It was perhaps the most lifeless and plodding movie I have ever seen.(Literary reviewers have characterized the book itself using much the same language.) And I found the basic plot totally immoral to the core. An architect who considers himself a genius far above the realm of normal human beings sees that his masterful building plan has been altered during construction and so he decides to blow it up rather than have it tarnish his reputation. And that is Rand's “hero!” The next time that Rand came into my mind was about ten years ago when her annotations in her personal copy of C.S. Lewis' book The Abolition of Man came to light.

If you view a copy of that book on-line, you might definitely get the idea that she did not think much of Lewis. A few of her opinions on him are that he was:

“an abysmal bastard,” “monstrosity,” “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity,” “pickpocket of concepts,” “God-damn, beaten mystic,” “abysmal scum!,” “this monster” “the bastard,” “an old fool—and nothing more,” “this incredible medieval monstrosity,” “the cheap driveling nonentity,” and “abysmal caricature” who postures as a 'gentleman and a scholar”

As to his ideas, “the rational to him is blind faith” and “Oh, BS! – and total BS!” And after all of this name-calling, she even has the nerve of accusing him at one point of resorting to an ad hominem argument.

Defenders of Lewis have pointed out that the more substantial of her criticisms demonstrate that she did not really understand what he was saying in his book. But this was apparently typical of the way she treated those who disagreed with her; she often resorted to reducing them to caricatures. I am afraid that even if she had truly understood Lewis' ideas, she still would not have thought much of them.

Here are some good thoughts from the Christian blogger Robert Stroud, starting with his comment that “it’s no surprise she disliked Lewis. He had been delivered from a self-centered worldview, and recognized that we have been created by a loving Father for a grand, and eternal purpose.”

“Rand was a Soviet refugee, and much of what she anticipated, has come to pass. Unbridled government regulations, she predicted, would strangle creativity and production. The welfare state would collapse upon itself as it eroded the incentive to work. In her call for less government interference and oversight, she echoes the concerns of growing numbers of Americans on both the left and the right.”

“There is great irony present here. While Rand devotees and serious Christians would share many fears about oppressive governments . . . they are ill-suited allies. Despite this commonality, the basic reasons for distrusting secular institutions, and more expressly, their solutions to the problem are diametrically opposed.”

“For Lewis, the atheist turned Christian apologist, hope comes only from God, not from a laissez faire government. While most Christians do not believe in the “coerced compassion” of unlimited taxation to support people unwilling to work [in Rand's words], we utterly disagree with Rand’s elevation of selfishness as virtue.”

That is why I was rather shocked to learn a little while ago that one of the active members of our church actually admired Rand's writings. I think that it shows an unfortunate trend in evangelical Christianity in the United States to merge certain self-serving political and economic theories together with biblical beliefs even though they may be totally incompatible.

As Josh Jones says in Open Culture, “The political intersection of Ayn Randian libertarians and Evangelical conservatives is a baffling phenomenon for most of us outside the American right. It’s hard to reconcile the atheist, arch-capitalist and despiser of social welfare with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount.” He also states that “one would hardly find her sympathetic to religion or its expositors at any point in her career” and that “she ridiculed religion in all its forms.”

It is indeed true that some issues like politics make strange bedfellows. But we need to make sure that those who share our bed do not lead us into spiritual adultery.