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It's summer, and the thoughts of all parents turn to things that they could never get to during the school year. For myself, I'm assigning the works of two largely discredited 20th century authors, Ayn Rand and Alfred Korzybski. I was in post secondary school for a number of years, and the only in-school reference I heard to either one of them was a law professor saying something like "and then you've got Korzybski and all that crap..." partially under his breath during a lecture.
I have an old copy of Korzybski's Science and Sanity (or, more correctly, "Excerpts from Science and Sanity") that I've been half-heartedly trying to read for about 20 years. I could never get past the introduction, which is hard to follow, and seems a little self-important. I do find the general concepts of his work compelling (as I currently understand them -- a criticism of the human tendency to categorize, a rejection of the validity of binary logic in most real-world situations, and the inherent limitations of human language in thought), as well as the slogan I see repeated by modern-day proponents: "The map is not the territory". Wish me luck with this one - the reading is difficult, and the author has been run out of the halls of academia. There's also the nagging suspicion that a wholesale adoption of Korzybski's teachings would lead to more or less total mental paralysis. I know even less about Rand, but have had several friends who admired her work. Admittedly, I've always been a little suspicious of the whole thing, but that's not entirely fair, since I haven't read it. I've been looking for electronic versions of her work (readable on a Palm OS smartphone) without luck, but I did find an ascii version of a piece called Anthem at project Gutenburg. She wrote this early on, and it's a short story about a futuristic totalitarian communal society where servitude, obedience, and a complete rejection of the individual are the rule, and one man's discovery of individuality (and one woman's discovery of servitude and obedience to an individual rather than a society). It's a quick read, and, taken as a light work of fiction, is not bad. Looked at from a moral or philosophical perspective, it seems sophomoric and a little repugnant -- she sets up at least two false dichotomies (individualism is either everything or nothing, people are either virtuously individualistic or irredeemably wretched), and uses the classic "straw-man" approach of setting up a contrived and impossibly vulnerable villain (in this case, the society and its benighted elders) and knocking it down in a display of righteousness (the escape and self-realization of the protagonist). To be fair, this is an early work, and it's actually refreshing to read when you consider that it was written by someone who had experience in the Stalinist USSR (I think she did, from reading her biography). I may have to break down and procure paper versions of her later works, but I'll get to them somehow. |
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Rory wrote
She said somewhere that the only things that do not need to exist are the things man made. With that in mind, the villian is just a villian and need not be "built up." The characterizations are aristolian. The glorification of man as a artistic mode. Art is more important than history...or something like that.