A few weeks ago, combing through DVD's at the local library, I came upon the 1948 movie version of The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, screenplay by Ayn Rand, based on her novel. I decided to give it a look.
The movie concerns an architect, Howard Roarke, who designs brilliant buildings, and is unwilling to see his beautiful plans ruined by the mediocrities who control the money, which controls popular tastes. So tenacious is he that he abandons architecture and takes a job as a manual laborer rather than see his masterpieces bastardized. Only the intervention of a good woman lures him back to the profession, and even then he must battle continually to get his visions of modern buildings made into reality. He remains poor but retains his integrity, while another architect prospers by selling his professional soul.
It seems to me that the point of the movie is that a solitary genius is worth more than many so-so people, and must stick to his principles, even if it means his talents will go unnoticed and unfulfilled for a long time, if ever.
It reminded me of another movie, one I remember from the early 1970's, Sometimes a Great Notion, based on a Ken Kesey novel and starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman. This second film told the story of a family of (very) independent loggers in the Pacific Northwest who defy unions and timber barons to continue operating as they think best. In the end, they are destroyed by their own insistence on doing everything their own way. The family motto was "Never give an inch," and the film says this is sometimes a great notion, but often leads to disaster.
So, shall a person who has independent ideas and tendencies insist on doing everything his own way, or be willing to reach some accomodations with society, to go along to get along?
Ayn Rand was the supreme proponent of individualism. I thought the characters in The Fountainhead were two-dimensional and not very interesting, good guys who were noble to a fault and bad guys who were irredeemable in their willingness to prostitute themselves for material success. Sometimes a Great Notion is a much better movie.
Ms. Rand - many years dead now - is a philosophical fountainhead for the radical right in current American politics. As an individualist, she claimed that charity and social welfare are counter-productive because they foster dependence. Therefore, the best favor anyone can do for impoverished people, addicted people, and so forth, is to encourage them to help themselves, but not to offer any material support that would only leave them dependent on continuing handouts.
There is just enough truth in her treatise to make it plausible to the already half-convinced. Helping is really hurting, so don't contribute to charity, and dump whatever government programs are meant to assure a minimal standard of living for everyone.
Except that I don't believe in Satan, I might call this the devil's argument. We can justify all our greed, our hard-heartedness, in a nice bit of self-justification. We turn a blind eye to the misery around us for the enlightened betterment of the poor. Crawling back into the gutter is good for them! What could be tidier? Or more wrong?
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