The objectivists were appalled by Witness, for it contradicted everything in their metaphysics of aggressive selfishness. The book talked of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. It raised terrifying questions about the human soul and the depths to which it might sink without divine grace. It painted Communism as evil, to be sure, but Chambers was at pains to demonstrate that the original impulse behind Communism was human and even noble—an idea that must have sent the fanatically anti-Communist Rand into neural overdrive. The book’s praise for and commentary on Hugo’s Les Miserables, and its moving depiction of the shared humanity of all men in their suffering, showed up Rand’s coldly intellectual anti-altruism for the nasty Gradgrindism that it was.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
A second look ...
... The Witness Revisited. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Whittaker Chambers' review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, "Big Sister Is Watching You," which is referred to in this article, can be found here.
ReplyDeleteAnd a recent response to that review by Michael Berliner, "the senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives," can be found here.
The article you have generously linked for your readers says: "As he wrote at the end of Witness concerning his son, 'I want him to see for himself upon the scale of the universes that God, the soul, faith, are not simple matters, and that no easy or ingenuous view of them is possible.'" Well, I would offer two comments: (1) I do not know why WITNESS never appeared on my "must read" list in the past, but it is certainly there now, and I thank you for pointing me in that direction; (2) Whittaker Chambers' comment might have been the kind of statement made by God himself; after all, according to my theological perspective, that is exactly what God has done with mankind as He steadfastly and patiently waits for individuals to find and travel their own unique paths at the ends of which they can comprehend the Divine.
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