On Pages viii, ix and x of her Introduction to her book, The Fountainhead, Rand self-attributes that the highest, ideal conceptions of artistic products or brilliant inventions of humans are like the most elevated religious aspirations of believers. She is right that there is a connection because the creator, producer and inventor utilize their reason, their hunches, their instincts, and imagination to envision the object that they will be inventing or creating.
Since idealists from Plato forward ontologically and often point out that reason and spirit are but respective worldly and otherworldly aspects of the same universal force or rational process and reality (though Rand the atheist denies that spirit exists), it would make sense that the high ideals that Roark conceives of and then produces architecturally in the everyday world, are of such brilliant and rare excellence, that such a product of creative reverie from one mind is a near-religious construction.
Rand wants to mine the same mine as do religionists, though, “ . . . I said that religious abstractions are the product of man’s mind, not of supernatural revelation. I would counter that religious abstractions and high-end art of a product of our minds, and are also divinely inspired, but I know that the Good Spirits are creators and artists, and they do guide and inspire us, though what we invent and create is still in part original.
Rand goes on: “What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near monopoly of religion: ethics—not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ‘ethics,’ the realm of values man’s code of good and evil, reverence, grandeur, which pertains to the realm of man’s values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.”
My response: it seems patent that Rand the secular humanist has made plans for humans to self-realize or at least an elite few of them like Roark will, and that these paragons of secular, rational virtue will be like gods, and their rational ethics of personal, life-long, full-tilt pursuit of the creation of objects exemplify these exalted values, will self-impel them to seek to replace religious artistic ambition with human dedication to secular, worldly production of objects and art of comparable excellence. Humans pursue excellence in line with self-worship as gods, and their productions and creations are undertaken ethically as humans, not servants of divine beings.
Rand continues: “Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of the rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside the earth and beyond man’s reach. ‘Exaltation’ is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. ‘Worship’ means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. ‘Reverence’ means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. ‘Sacred’ means superior to and not-to-be touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from man’s downgrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified without concepts, words, or recognition.”
My response: it seems that Rand the atheist want to wrest from the clutches of religion and belief in the supernatural, to give humans that are secular the ethical, rational, cultural, and elevating values that will release them to invent and create and produce, to fill their worldly, mortal lives with value and meaning, sans acceptance of God’s existence.
I am not opposed to her project for worldly fulfillment, finding meaning and value to live by here and now, enjoyed by inventors, creators, and producers, but as a follower of the Good Spirits, I attribute to the latter the traits of being individuals, individuators, scientists, capitalists, inventors, and moral leaders, so they would heartily endorse, bless, and support Rand’s project. Through Mavellonialism, my moderating rational religion, faith and humanism complement and include each other, they are not exclusive, competing, and conflicting.
Rand continues: “It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the mark of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
It is in this sense, with its meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship.”
My response: we as living angels can become mini-gods but this is suffuse with mysticism, reason, life and matter. Faith, worldliness, science, matter and inspiration and values are intermingled and uniquely defined by the individuator as his personal interpretation of what reality means for him embodied in his inventions and creative objects.
As living angels, humans need not worship themselves, for becoming inherently is an act of worshipping the Divine Couple, and they are welcoming and accepting of human self-improvement; and they are neither jealous of nor intimidated by human striving but believe that becoming and striving are actually human obligations instilled in them by their Creators.
We may want to take back our exalted and exalting emotions, values, and ethics from traditional altruistic religions, but this can be sorted out without losing faith and that divine connection and love through rational religion and a faith of self-realization becoming popular among the people of a society.
Rand continues: “It is an emotion that a few—a very few—men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent fire-extinguishers.”
My response: it is traditional that there are a few naturally occurring or self-occurring great souls that will feel those rare creative sparks that inspire these people to originate and create, but the ethical science of self-realization gives people the training for the masses to become individuators. All had that divine spark, but few choose to act upon it as a dedicated way of life.
Rand continues: “Do not confuse ‘man-worship’ with the many attempts not to emancipate morality from religion, but to substitute a secular meaning for the worst, the most irrationalist elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely substitute ‘society’ for God as the beneficiary of man’s self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of identity, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux, ruled by miracles and shaped by whims—not God’s whims, but man’s or ‘society’s.’ These neo-mystics are not man-worshipers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.”
My response: Let me unpack this rich paragraph: Rand sees morality that is pro-human and good for humans (rational egoism) only if morality is freed from the clutches of traditional religions by secular humanists. Secular ideologies of many types, over the last 100 years, substitute society for God, and remain a mass movement where collectivist and irrationalist ethical worship of a cause keep people addicted to a self-immolating moral system that degrades and crushes all in its path, and these ideological causes are what Rand, Eric Hoffer and Max Stirner all rail against.
Fanatics, their beloved ideology, and their true-believing followers are not potential individuators and nor are they rational or kind, but rational religion can provide us with everything good that Rand offers, without losing spiritual sources of love, strength and hope that belief in God provides, and what humans desperately hunger for.
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