Review of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

Cover via Amazon

In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer Fleming has been out for a long time (since 2002), but it’s new to me. I was recommending its sequels based on the opinions of friends, who also advised that I start at the beginning. I’m glad I did. The first line of the book reads: “It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby”.

With an opening like that, how can you not keep reading?

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‘Goddess’ Provides Context to Ayn Rand’s Ideas

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

Goddess of the Market tackles a difficult subject and does it well. Jennifer Burns writes an even-handed biography of Ayn Rand, neither fawning nor condemning, sympathetic on a human level, but retaining a journalistic neutrality on the issue of Rands novels and ideas.  The level of detail about Rand’s personality and personal life, however, gave those ideas much needed context.

I have a semi-secret love of biographies, and I thoroughly enjoy biographies that effectively link a person’s personal and political lives, complete with a half-ton of footnotes that keep me flipping to the back of the book throughout my reading.

Image via WikipediaI came away from the book with many of my theories about Ms. Rand confirmed, and with a deeper sense of pity for her than before, with my disgust for and condemnation of her ideas intact. It became clear to me less than a quarter of the way through the book that Rand was a very unhappy, damaged human being, who built a philosophy that made her ‘positive’ (active) weaknesses her strengths, and her ‘negative’ (passive) weaknesses evils.

Clearly the Russian Revolution had had a major traumatic impact on her life, one she never fully came to grips on. Worse, she was raised in a home without much affection by at least one parent that openly admitted she hadn’t wanted a family, and had a natural tendency toward argumentativeness and concrete, literalist thinking.

Ayn Rand would not thank me for my pity. Instead, she would despise this entire discussion as ‘emotionalism’ and condemn me as a ‘collectivist’, a ‘parasite’, and ‘anti-reason’. She built an incredibly detailed soap bubble within which all of those condemnations are true. Unfortunately for the success of her philosophy as philosophy (versus religion – as which it will almost certainly remain successful), that soap bubble is built without regard to several important truths about human nature, the natural world, and neurology, any one of which can easily pop that bubble.

On its literary merits alone, the biography is excellent. From a psychological perspective, the author gives enough detail about Rand’s and Branden’s and even the mysterious Frank O’Connor to unravel some of the mysteries of why they acted as they did and built this ediface that they persisted in calling a philosophy and treating as a religion.

As a counselor, I am appalled that there is (apparently) evidence that Nathaniel Branden revealed confidential therapy information in philosophical discussions for the purpose of judging the therapy client in terms of the philosophy. That is unethical in any philosophy, illegal in many jurisdictions, and should have been reason to long since have had his license to practice therapy pulled. And yet (as far as I know) he continued to practice therapy for decades after the incidents cited, and for all I know still does.

One clear pattern emerges through the book that gives credence to the idea that while Rand, and her Objectivist movement, claim to value reason above all other values, they were (and are) a faith based ideology. Consistently, over time, when facts and evidence challenged Objectivist ideology, rather than to allow these facts to challenge the assumptions (the soap bubble) upon which Objectivism (and many modern branches of libertarianism) are based, Rand and her followers would reject the facts and then work feverishly to obfuscate them with deliberate creation of pseudo-scientific counter-facts.

Nowhere is this more clear than in Rand’s own personal life. Because smoking and sexual attraction represented political ideals to Rand, she risked her life (smoking) and valuable personal relationships (sexual relationships) in order to hold her philosophy above the facts, thus eventually causing her own death and a nasty parting of the ways with the Brandens.

This also colored what appears to be a forty year addiction to amphetamines. No modern substance abuse counselor can look at this aspect of her life, the inevitable effects on her brain chemistry and (inevitably) brain function, and fail to see the relationship between it and her later rigidity of thought and extreme paranoia.

Whether you are a fan of Ayn Rand and her teachings or someone who is opposed to them, this book offers valuable insight into the development of her ideas and the personality behind them. Whether you would villify or beatify Rand (and I don’t suggest you do either), this book offers the information necessary to put her ideas in the context of her thought process, her personal history, and her personality.  It’s definitely worth the read.

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Related articles

• Personal Thoughts on Ayn Rand (walkingupstream.blogspot.com)
• Jesus and Ayn Rand — Common Good and Individualist Good (pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com)
• Ayn Rand: a profile (telegraph.co.uk)

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