Customer Reviews

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In these essays from the 1960s and early 1970s, Ayn Rand identifies the underlying nihilism of the Left and the student movement of the time. Already back then, she warned of the toxic influence of the left and pointed out that the intellectual battle does not consist of opposing, denouncing or evading, but of exposing and disproving evil ideas and proclaiming a consistent alternative to the left's bankrupt philosophy.

In the essay Apollo and Dionysus, she compares the 1 million people that converged on Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11 with the 300 000 that gathered at Woodstock on August 15 that year. Rand explores these events in the light of Nietzsche's metaphysical principles of reason and emotion as observed in Greek theatre.

Whilst denying that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists, she shows how the media virtually ignored the one event while blowing the significance of the other out of all proportion. On the one hand, decent people were sharing an event of great achievement and on the other, self-indulgent hedonists behaving like pigs. As she explains so eloquently, it is irrational emotions that drag people down into the mud, and it is reason that lifts us up to the stars.

In the essay The Left: Old And New, Rand predicted that the issue of the environment would be the next big crusade of the Leftists, after Vietnam. In this, as on so many other issues, she was correct and we still have the EnviroNuts with us and they are shriller than ever before with their self-serving tooth fairy tales of global warming.

The short essay "Political Crimes" looks at the dangerous notion that there could be a distinction between political and non-political criminals. Crime is a violation of the rights of others by force of fraud, thus there is no such thing as a political crime. The essay The Chicken's Homecoming discusses the results of promulgating doctrines like Pragmatism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, and how these doctrines disarmed the best and unleashed the nihilists. In this regard, see The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

The Age Of Envy is one of the very best in this collection. In it, Rand claims that the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment had been followed by ours, the Age of Envy. She takes envy to mean: The hatred of the good for being the good. Here too, she nails down the left, old and new, with keen insight and prescience. She demonstrates how the appeasement of evil has been an undertow of mankind's cultural stream down the ages.

The Comprachicos is the disturbing essay that concludes the collection. It warns against the hijacking of the minds of children and students by the leftist, collectivist educational establishment. This even more true now than it was then: the modern seats of leftism are the universities and the Old Media which Rand exposes throughout the book.

To show how right Ayn Rand has been, I highly recommend the following books: The New Thought Police and The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Unholy Alliance by David Horowitz, treason by Ann Coulter and Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild by Michelle Malkin.

In these essays from the 1960s and early 1970s, Ayn Rand identifies the underlying nihilism of the Left and the destructive student movement of the time. Already back then, she warned of the toxic influence of the left and pointed out that the intellectual battle does not consist of opposing, denouncing or evading, but of exposing and disproving evil ideas and proclaiming a consistent alternative to the left's bankrupt philosophy.

In the essay Apollo and Dionysus, she compares the 1 million people that converged on Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969 to witness the launch of Apollo 11 with the 300 000 that gathered at Woodstock on August 15 that year. Rand explores these events in the light of Nietzsche's metaphysical principles of reason and emotion as observed in Greek theatre.

Whilst denying that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists, she shows how the media virtually ignored the one event while blowing the significance of the other out of all proportion. On the one hand, decent people were sharing an event of great achievement and on the other, self-indulgent hedonists were behaving like pigs. As she explains so eloquently, it is irrational emotions that drag people down into the mud, and it is reason that lifts us up to the stars.

In the essay The Left: Old And New, Rand predicted that the issue of the environment would be the next big crusade of the Leftists, after Vietnam. In this, as on so many other issues, she was correct and we still have the EnviroNuts with us and they are shriller than ever before with their self-serving fairy tales of global warming/climate change.

The short essay "Political Crimes" looks at the dangerous notion that there could be a distinction between political and non-political criminals. Crime is a violation of the rights of others by force of fraud, thus there is no such thing as a political crime. The essay The Chicken's Homecoming discusses the results of promulgating doctrines like Pragmatism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis, and how these doctrines disarmed the best and unleashed the nihilists. In this regard, see The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

The Age Of Envy is one of the very best essays in this collection. In it, Rand claims that the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment had been followed by ours, the Age of Envy. She takes envy to mean: The hatred of the good for being the good. Here too, she nails down the left, old and new, with keen insight and prescience. She demonstrates how the appeasement of evil has been an undertow of mankind's cultural stream down the ages.

The Comprachicos is the disturbing concludingessay. It warns against the hijacking of the minds of children and students by the leftist, collectivist educational establishment. This is even more true now than it was then: the modern seats of leftism are the universities and the Old Media which Rand exposes throughout the book. See The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz.

To show how right Ayn Rand has been, I highly recommend the following books: The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds and The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left by David Horowitz, Treason by Ann Coulter and Unhinged by Michelle Malkin.

Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey

The star of this book is Rand's essay "Apollo and Dionysus," a comparison of the near-simultaneous events Woodstock and the first lunar landing. I was in high school at the time, and I remember the Woodstock explosion that occurred during the school year following the August concert, the remarkable number of classmates who adopted the hippie lifestyle and pretty much stopped doing any work whatever. One guy who'd been a valedictory prospect dropped right off the academic radar, probably due to drugs. Rand's suggestion that Woodstock represented an abandonment of reason is supported by on-scene reports of concert-goers who simply showed up with the clothes on their backs -- no plans for food, water, lodgings or anything, and the fact that concert organizers also neglected such essential considerations. The Woodstock army completely trashed the place, ending up wallowing in a big muddy mess while standing stupidly outside in the rain.

On the other hand, the lunar mission was a sterling example of human achievement driven by rationality, the culmination of the application of brainpower to a problem, and the success which resulted therefrom. Oh certainly, Rand drew (and draws) a lot of fire, but she was absolutely correct in her belief that upgrades of our human condition will only be developed by people who think and act, and not by herds of hippies standing in the rain.

In this book Ayn Rand looks at numerous aspects of our culture from Woodstock and the Apollo moon missions to public education and relates them to various philosophic principles. She shows not only how irrational the current left-wing philosophy is, but also how it is now morally bankrupt, especially compared with "the old left". Despite the colossal failure of socialism time and time again, modern liberals- to this day- continue to idealize it, even the horrors of the former Soviet Union. Just look at the book "In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

Please note that this title has been replaced by Ayn Rand's "Return of the Primitive" which contains all the material from this book, plus additional essays by both Ayn Rand and a contemporary Objectivist.

Don't buy this. Buy The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, an updated and more modern edition of this work, with additional content and social commentary.

This book examines how the educational system of America has slowly destroyed our culture by prioritizing socialization above the ability to think. How conformity has made the majority of Americans easy dupes of a class war in which the greedy loot the country, a violation of capitalism. Rand offers no plan on 'taking back our country' beyond utterly reforming the educational system to create thinkers rather than fearful insecure child-adults.

The 'dated' part is Rand didn't buy into the environmental movement (she also has an irrational dislike of hippies). At this point in time, the ice caps are melting, the ozone is holey, and the oceans are overfished. This was a mistake on Rand's part, as she never understood the concept of 'The Tragedy of the Commons.'

I did enjoy the digression on 'values vs. people, a false dichotomy,' but Rand's stances on environmental issues are obviously wrong with the science of the 21st century available. Thus only three stars.

The things the left has always hated are individual success and individual freedom. Both of these hatreds are exposed for what they really are in this book. While some may try to confuse the issue, saying that she must be leftist due to her cry for freedom and individualism, they can only make that erronious claim due to the errors of the right. The modern Luddites hide in the environmental movement, but the're still there, still hating that we have better living conditions than a medevial pesant, and that we are more free than that medevial pesant as well.

[My review of The Return of the Primitive. The New Left is out of print, but available used.]

In 1971, Ayn Rand published a collection of her essays called "the New Left." She edited this collection herself based on a suggestion from a fan.

Peter Schwartz, a second-hander at the Ayn Rand Institute, came out with a new version of this work. He kept all of Rand's original essays, added one new Rand essay, and added three of his own. The most obvious question is: by what right does Mr. Schwartz re-edit someone else's work in order to get some of his stuff in print? Since Rand is in this case the victim, and I don't want to give the sanction of the victim (so to speak), I'll review this work solely in reference to the original Rand articles, ignoring Mr. Schwartz's "contributions" in my ranking and comments.

I'm generally critical of Rand the philosopher. However, she was a reasonably intelligent person. Her greatest weakness was her tendency to speculate on historical and psychological matters which she knew little about. However, her "creativity" was something of a benefit when it came to cultural criticism. In fact, I would say that she had any number of interesting and insightful things to say about the state of culture. Her article on the "Free Speech Movement" in Berkeley is a gem. Her comments on Woodstock are good as well, although she is given to a bit of exaggeration (e.g., Kant is the "first hippy"). And in her article "Racism," she courageously came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which violated private property rights. (It has even been used by the federal courts to uphold regulations in the area of "sexual harassment" although the law on its face has nothing to due with sexual harassment.) The "Age of Envy" contains a withering critique of feminism, but I wonder how Rand could consistently oppose this movement based on her presuppositions.

First of all, her claim to reason is just as solid as any "propagandist" it is flawed and bent to serve her ends. Individualism is not the property of capitalism. Capitalism produces a unifying demand, which creates conformity. A capitalist's freedom is: the right to exploit for personal advancement. Glorifing this "right" is what completely undermines capitalism as a viable system. She accuses people of being misinformed about capitalism when she doesn't know as much about socialism. The socialism that she knows is part of the past. Stalinism holds no relevance to today's left. Before you can accuse us of being misinformed about capitalism (which is just a handy way of saying that we're wrong because we don't conform to your beliefs.) you must realize that the socialism of today is built on a much more solid base. Michael Albert has created a new form of socialism, Parecon, that is based on wages equivilant to effort. Individualism is not discouraged. Human rights are not undermined. Really, if you feel the need to hate socialism, you should know what it is. Hypocracy is not a way out. If you don't read at least some socialist thought, as I have with capitalism, you cannot make a educated decision.
http://www.parecon.org

Ayn Rand is just something too good to be true! And - contrary to a review below - "The new left" provides no doubt the most accesable route to the core of her "philosophy", that is, to the barren and low-minded enterprise of vulgar "libertarianism" which turns out to be the "quickiest way to make comical intellectual history and - by the same token - ridicule oneself in the project. "The new left" can only be read as such a joke - as a parody of the concept of "negative freeedom" and of the intellectual heritage of classical liberalism, in general.

So, what we have got here in the final analysis is in effect a vindication of the LEFT wing policy. Ayn Rand's ideological mission exhibited so clearly in "The new left" has the funny character of "the dirty old man" whose outlook is anything but appealing but who anyway tries desperately to make the best of it: "freedom is just another word for ...". Above all, the greatest merit of the book is in its "easy to ridicule"-"easy to wipe out" -character with disguised "arguments" void of actual content or strenght and its degenerated "ethics" void of any real sense of "goodness". This reveals admittedly "the honesty of Ayn Rand's thinking" - it is down to earth nature: we don't need any sophisticated philosophy but the legitimation of the "nonsocial contract" or "money-talk" or "this is what we are" -revealation. (Un)fortunatly, this program (of "The new left" par excellance) must always (eventually) be conveyed - so it seems! - in such drastic terms that any reasonable civilised person has no option but to reject it (and laugh at it). Still one more point of the book - as an available icon of the whole "libertarian movement". What is striking in this "radical" interpretation of individual freedom is its - after all - conservative core (cf. above): Rand doesn't seem to be concerned of "universal freedom" of ANY inidividual but only of "US": the way of life and values of some minor western/angloamerican wealthy elite and their aspirations - their "freedom" - no matter what unfortunate effects (e.g.) global capitalism might have, say, in the third world - in its environment, culture and society - in human rights and personal freedoms. And then again - even rockn' roll and smoking seem to be real enemies of this "rand kind of" freedom!! Of course this is just the old story, and Rand's "The new left wing" epitomizes now the dead old corrupted ideology. As such Rand's book is an important memorizer of the acutness and crucial nature of major social, economical and political problems mankind faces in the beginning of the third millenium: in the face of the collapse of socialism and the failure of capitalism (cf. e.g. David Korten) one must address the question of "the third way" in a rigorous manner (cf. e.g.Anthony Giddens).

Philosophy is famous of its open and divergent nature which tolerates ALL kinds of approaches - also Ayn Rand's one. However, we have fortunately as well such really philosophical thinkers like Simone Weil; and it is obvious that Weil and Rand "wrestle in totally different series/weight classes"! And, of course, it is plausible to read "the other nonfeminist american writer" - Norman Mailer at the same time with "The new left" - I mean the novel "Why We Are In Vietnam"...