Rand Versus Lewis: It’s No Contest

[Valin]

Power Line:

 

Steven Hayward

3/28/13

 

For someone who represented herself as the acme of philosophy and individual strength, Ayn Rand could be remarkably touchy. Whittaker Chambers’s famous review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review infuriated her, to the point that she would not be in the same room with William F. Buckley ever after.

 

Buckley and Chambers weren’t the only ones to feel her volcanic wrath. Over at the fine First Things blog, Matthew Schmitz directs our attention to an obscure 1998 volume by Robert Mayhew entitled Ayn Rand’s Marginalia : Her Critical Comments on the Writings of over Twenty Authors. I’m not sure it is proper to publish anyone’s marginalia or casual notes, and this project certainly doesn’t do Rand much credit. Turns out Rand didn’t like Hayek, von Mises, or Barry Goldwater. She appears to be the perfect person to argue why the People’s Front of Judea is superior to the “splitters” in the Judean People’s Front.

 

Turns out she really didn’t like C.S. Lewis. Fair enough for an atheist like Rand. But the Lewis book she takes on is The Abolition of Man, which is Lewis’s entirely reason-based argument against moral relativism and in favor of natural law. Lewis’s theology doesn’t turn up at all. It builds a strong case against centralized political power based on scientific pretensions to principles that he reveals to be nihilism. Yet Rand proves herself the most casual and sloppy reader of Lewis’s argument, making marginal comments that would earn a high school student a C- grade for missing the point entirely. For example, there this passage from Lewis:

 

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

I'm sure Jack was absolutely devastated by Ayn not liking his book...or him. Assuming he even knew about it.