An Ayn Rand influence?

By JAY AMBROSE
Scripps Howard News Service
Thursday, July 19, 2007

You drive into Telluride, an old Colorado mining town where the plainest homes now cost a couple of million and the view is worth more. After checking into your motel room, you ride a gondola up one side of a dramatic, even astonishing box canyon to Mountain Village. It's time to see what the objectivists are up to.

Quite a bit, it seems, and with disciplined intensity. Hundreds of followers of the late anti-collectivist, pro-individualist thinker and novelist Ayn Rand are meeting thousands of feet above sea level not to have a high old time, but to study and learn about law, ethics, history, science, drama, philosophy, economics and more.

I myself attend several courses, including one called "Giants of Law." Thomas Bowden, a lawyer with a master's degree in history, is exceptional in conveying the magnificence of law in human affairs. He does this mainly through discussing a number of remarkable figures, such as Edward Coke, an Englishman who put himself at grave risk in the 1600s by defending the rule of law against the druthers of a king and left us a dictum Bowden kept repeating: "Reason is the life of the law."

Anyone suspecting an anarchistic strain in objectivism is disabused of this notion as Bowden talks about the imperative need for law, but law that is understandable, accessible and authoritative, that is "validated" by adherence to "the principle of individual rights" and that "governs the government."

Another superb course is on corporations. Accenting the objectivist devotion to laissez-faire capitalism, the instructor, Yaron Brook, extols the American corporation as an efficient, wealth-creating form of business that constitutes the marrow of our economy. The holder of a Ph.D. in finance, he skillfully explains how corporate regulations are already distorting the market to ill effect and what the dangers would be if corporations should fall victim to social activists. Their interference would hit corporations where it hurts most -- profits -- and all of America would feel the pain.

Brook, as you might guess, is not a socialist. The president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute that is sponsoring the conference, he once was. He was 16 then, and an Israeli, and he happened upon a book that has reshaped the thinking of countless numbers of young and old, Rand's powerful "Atlas Shrugged." It turned his outlook inside out. Now a U.S. citizen, he is involved in an objectivist program to get this tale of independent, creative individuals who figuratively hold the world on their shoulders in the hands of as many high-school students as feasible.

My first question to him in an interview is to tell me what objectivism is -- a social movement, a political idea, what?

"It's a philosophy," he says, and it's that, for sure; it has a theory of knowledge coming from sensory observation, an ethics based on individual self-interest and very specific ideas about art, society and government, some of them explained in intriguing general sessions by Leonard Peikoff, heir to the Ayn Rand estate and to her fundamental theories. The philosophy is unquestionably opposed to leftist babble, and that I like; but it mistrusts conservatives and even libertarians, Brook tells me. It has no use at all for religion or any supernatural scheme.

My toughest question to Brook is whether objectivism is an Ayn Rand cult. This Russian expatriate who despised that land's communism was a smart, fascinating woman, I say, but not the most profound intellectual of her era. Brook thinks she was, but says no, objectivism is not a cult; Ayn Rand was fallible.

I ask him to define his institute's main goal, and he tells me that it is not to make everyone an objectivist but, instead, to have a cultural influence.

There are aspects of objectivism I definitely don't buy. But it's heartening to see solidly grounded intellectuals stand up for the ideas of free will and a knowable, objective reality and to see them stand against extreme egalitarianism that goes so far as to worry about humans lording it over other species or against a modernist nihilism in the arts that undermines so much that matters deeply.

An objectivist cultural influence? Yes, I think as I take my last ride of the week down the gondola and back to beautiful Telluride, that could be a good thing, at the least an antidote for excesses brought our way by some other less tenable philosophies.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)