Solidity
Andrea Harris at Spleenville has some interesting observations on the FOX News dhimmi’s forced conversion to Islam. What pricked up my ears was her comment about Ayn Rand, who, despite all flaws, still has a solid moral core that informs her work. Here is the quote:
…. even though long ago the “Randian heat” as Florence King called it has worn off, and I can see the massive faults in it, I still haven’t been able to get rid of my copy of Atlas Shrugged. Sure, the main characters make two dimensions look well-rounded. Sure, it’s as full of long speeches as a Castro breakfast. Sure, Rand’s philosophy is beyond cracked. But when she wasn’t making her ponderous and bizarre points, the writer that was buried deep inside her managed to struggle out occasionally, and allowed her to create a real character with a real, human point of view. Typically, Rand always brought these people to a miserable end. One such is the character of Cheryl Taggart, the hapless wife of mealy-mouthed railroad tycoon Jim Taggart (on a side note, Rand’s evil characters were as cardboard as her good ones). Here is Cheryl coming to a realization of just what was wrong with people around her:
“–it’s as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion–an explosion is someting hard and solid–but destroyed by…by some horrible kind of softening…as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds–and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo.”
People want, and need, solidity. If we can’t find it in our own culture, we’ll look for it in another. This “solidity,” by the way, is not a material solidity, but a psychic, even spiritual one. The problem is, our increasingly gooey culture can’t give us the ability to discern true solidity from tinsel fakes. In other words, good luck fighting off Muslim fanatics by going to the beach.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
