Literary Cruelty, Apathy, and Violence

One reason I am an Objectivist is because I came to see all the hypocrisies and bad ideas floating around in our culture just in the way Ayn Rand picks them out in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There are wonders in the world, too, but sometimes the culture hits one in the face with a cow patty.

This week, reading the Atlantic, I got cow-pattied. I stumbled upon a pure expression of the sick, twisted world-view that drives much of today's intellectual and literary culture.

In " The Aliens Next Door ," a review of a short-story collection by Lorrie Moore (a writer I'd never heard of) called Bark, reviewer Nathaniel Rich (whose name I don't recognize) writes: "Moore is not merely a brilliant noticer. She is also brilliant at noticing those things that 'one was supposed not to notice,' namely our seemingly limitless capacity for cruelty, apathy, and violence." (Emphasis added.)

Actually, this is mostly all that "literary" writers are praised for "noticing." But the truth is we, in the developed, free world, live amid little cruelty or violence, and apathy is more a trait of the lit-crit bien-pensants than of real people who work for a living. No one is praised for noticing the value and achievement created by most businesses; or the honor and decency of the vast majority; or way so many manage to pursue happiness with decent success.

The fact that people like Rich consider it the height of literary brilliance to wittily magnify what ills there are and lionize suffering, just shows how malevolent and out of touch with reality they are. And such are the intellectual leaders of our culture!

Did I mention that I'm a fan of Ayn Rand's novels ?

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