Ayn Rand witnessed the rise of the ’60s “ecology” movement (the forerunner of today’s environmentalism) and found much that was objectionable. She observed its antagonism toward industry, toward business, toward the application of technological solutions to material problems. She saw a new viewpoint emerging that vilified industrial development under capitalism as a threat to mankind.
This is tantamount to a rejection of the Industrial Revolution, which means a rejection of history’s greatest positive transformation in the length and quality of human life. The ecology movement, she argued, was ultimately calling for an “anti-industrial revolution” and seemed eager to condemn mankind to the squalor and misery of pre-industrial subsistence.
While environmentalism has evolved a great deal since the late ’60s, the ideological essence of the movement — its philosophical perspective on man’s relationship to nature — has not changed. Rand’s critique is as pertinent today as it was then.
In the ’60s campus protests, the issue of freedom of speech arose repeatedly. Protesters asserted an unrestricted “right” to demonstrate on campus and to occupy campus administration buildings. The Berkeley “free speech movement” was demanding, in the name of free speech, the “right” to violate a university policy forbidding political activity on campus.
In Ayn Rand’s view, these demands represented a fundamental confusion about the meaning of the right to free speech. “There can be no such thing as the right to an unrestricted freedom of speech (or of action) on someone else’s property. The fact that the university at Berkeley is owned by the state, merely complicates the issue, but does not alter it.” Indeed, what the chaos of the protests actually highlighted is that “no rights of any kind can be practiced without property rights.”
Ayn Rand is a philosopher interested in real-world issues. She understands that the abstract, technical problems in epistemology, the theory of knowledge — how we acquire and validate knowledge, how we can discover truth and avoid falsehood — have life-or-death consequences, and she was interested in identifying the impact of these issues on such fields as education.
Rand was deeply concerned about America’s educational system and the harmful influence of modern philosophy on the methods actually employed in the classroom. A supporter of Montessori education for young children, she was deeply critical of the Progressive school of education founded by philosopher John Dewey. In her view, the college protesters running riot in the ’60s were the inevitable products of Dewey’s pedagogical system.
Return of the Primitive includes Rand’s most comprehensive discussion of education: her article “The Comprachicos.”
In one of Ayn Rand’s most fascinating cultural commentaries, “Apollo and Dionysus,” she examines two historic events from 1969: the Woodstock music festival and the launch of Apollo 11 to the moon. From salient facts about these two events, and the culture’s response, Rand draws implications applicable not just to ’60s hippies, but to any individual in any era.
In her analysis, these two events expressed and dramatized an issue of profound philosophic importance: the alleged conflict between reason and emotion. “It is not true,” writes Rand, “that reason and emotion are irreconcilable antagonists or that emotions are a wild, unknowable, ineffable element in men. But that is what emotions become for those who do not care to know what they feel, and who attempt to subordinate reason to their emotions.”
As a cultural commentator, Ayn Rand is not primarily interested in denunciation, though she found much to denounce in the ideas and events dominating America at the time. Much more important to her is the projection of a positive ideal, the elaboration of her philosophy, Objectivism, as the alternative we should embrace.
In Rand’s view, the fundamental antidote to the emotionalism and irrationalism of the hippy, student “rebels” of the New Left is a proper understanding of reason. This is what she set out to accomplish.
“I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she writes, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. This — the supremacy of reason — was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism.”
