For the same reason that I think kids should read books on Communism, Marxism, Sufism, Buddhism, etc – to get a rounded idea of different kinds of thinking. I’d rather they read something like The Fountainhead so they’ll know what it is than be sheltered from an outdated philosophy. Doesn’t mean they need to adopt it.
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Marxism simplistic? The old boy was vague about how you got from socialism to communism, but you need to read his explanation of the role of social classes in society to realise that he was far from simplistic. His idea that the new industrial proletariat would be able to accomplish a revolution did indeed worry an awful lot of people - and the result was a gradual improvement of conditions, more or less universal education, and other changes intended by the ruling classes to stave off revolution. Marx possibly changed history, but to be an alternate history from the one he forecast.
He’s worth reading, even if it is only to see where he went wrong and how history turned out different from his predictions. I’m afraid that by comparison with Marx, Rand is a mental pygmy. (Am I allowed to write that?)
Surely there are better books by better authors putting the case for libertarianism?
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Largely because he just had the idea and the actual work was done by assistants. He defended himself by saying that architects don’t build houses. No, but they do actually produce the drawings. And nowadays, it’s the structural engineers who get paid more than the architects.
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Possibly so, but The Fountainhead is a lot less libertarian than Atlas Shrugged; it at least tries to be an actual story about human beings, somewhat. It’s more about individualism and personal expression than an outright expression of Objectivist philosophy the way her later books were. I’ll put it this way: if I had a kid and saw he was assigned The Fountainhead, it wouldn’t bother me. If he was reading Atlas Shrugged, we’d have a sit-down conversation about the ridiculousness of the worldview he was reading about.
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The teleology and the proposed actions were simplistic. The analysis was his best contribution (and pretty bang on).
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Fair enough, though the word I would prefer is “wrong”.
Though given the performance of the average economist and political philosopher, perhaps that should read “wrong, but less wrong than most.”
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Would I be correct in assuming that George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s political beliefs weren’t really discussed?
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Only in the context of the novels’ politics and their importance in the time they were we written. It was a lit class, so it was mostly focused on symbolism and the details of the writing.
Completely OT, but Huxley thought that BNW was a dystopia whereas most people would, if they put religion to one side, consider it an ideal place to live. Awkward curmudgeons like myself get to live on islands with like thinkers, the mass of the population gets bread and circuses, and the World Controllers are kindly philosopher kings. 1984 is partly a satire on the BBC, but it can also be seen as the mirror opposite of BNW. Whether they really have any resonance beyond a rather patrician English bubble I wouldn’t like to say.
[quote=“lolipop_jones, post:23, topic:75949, full:true”]The result of the latter is artworks that are disintegrating within a few years of their creation
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This is also a phenomenon with a centuries-long pedigree. Ever hear of white lead?
It often has much more to do with artists being, for one reason or another, dissatisfied with the conventional tools of the trade. Leonardo’s Last Supper is in notoriously poor condition because he invented a new technique to create it.
Maybe they should have let Michaelangelo do it after all.
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More that Gerhardt Richter had the idea.
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Then there was the vogue for painting with bitumen. Ah well, think of all the work it has created for museum conservators today.
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I wonder what Virgil might have made of fossils.
In a hundred million years, visiting aliens (which I’m not excluding humanity from), might well be able to find evidence of dentistry as the best compelling evidence for a technologically advanced civilization.
But I suppose there’s lots of candy wrappers, too. There’s so much of that sort of detritus they’ll be able to point to it and say when the 6th mass extinction event happened.
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I used to read a lot of Heinlein.
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So did I in my teens, but nowadays I find him creepy weird.
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Yeah. I don’t think I merely outgrew him.
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