How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis by Adam Weiner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rasputin in America

How Bad Writing Destroyed the World is a classic history of ideas. By that I mean that it is fundamentally an academic exercise, the purpose of which is to demonstrate erudition and an ability to sustain a cogent argument while wading through largely irrelevant material. Adam Weiner is a literary historian who is clearly determined to fulfil his academic duty. But he also wants to make what is largely irrelevant to the rest of us relevant by arguing that a bad 19th century novel is the cause of the 2008 financial crash. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t so much fail, as just forgets about it in most of the book.

Weiner’s thesis, and it is presented as such, is that Alan Greenspan in particular and, more generally, many leading figures in government and academic economics are guilty of the ideological sin of ‘objectivism’, the quasi-philosophical school of thought promoted by the Russian-emigre novelist Ayn Rand. They (as well as other eminences of a less liberal nature like Vladimir Lenin) were duped, no actually ‘programmed’, according to Weiner, because they didn’t appreciate the source of Rand’s thought in the Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky; nor did they read enough Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov in order to understand just how evil an influence - on literature as well as social thought - Chernyshevsky was.

The consequences of this literary ignorance, according to Weiner, have been dire:

“Disappointed that her novels, particularly Atlas Shrugged, had failed to transform reality into an objectivist paradise, Rand had created in Greenspan a final devastating hero, heir to Rakhmetov [a fictional Chernyshevskian character], heir to John Galt [one of Rand’s novelistic heroes], and freed him from her pages that he might operate unfettered in the medium of history. Greenspan was the flesh of her mind, her idea incarnate, and she must have wanted to live through him, as he began to wield objectivism, first in the White House, after her death in the Federal Reserve, where he would offer up the US economy in a spectacular hecatomb.”

The breathless floridity of this conclusion fortunately isn’t matched in the rest of the text, which has nothing to do with economic policy and a great deal to do with arcane literary influences.

There can be little doubt that ideas have consequences, and that some ideas are better than others. Nor is there little to argue against the fact that from time to time various fundamentally idiotic ideological fashions - one thinks of EST, the various brands of management-thought, and the currently dominant theories of corporate finance, to name but a few in addition to objectivism - prevail even among, especially among, the educated leadership of society.

Thus it has always been. The political writings of Aristotle and Plato are proof enough. The curriculum of any MBA programme is a confirming footnote. Indeed, it could credibly be argued that it is Christianity, with its doctrinal theory of individual salvation, that is the source of both Randian selfishness and Dostoevskian hatred of the untraditional. The situation is what psychiatrists call 'overdetermined'. There are as many explanations as there are tales to tell. Proving which tale is better is rationally impossible (The British serial killer, Ian Brady, was a keen reader of Dostoevsky. Make of that correlation what you will).

It is often a pleasant academic pastime to document the parentage of these ideas. It is aesthetically pleasing, minimally for the author, and may even help his career advancement. But beyond such personal satisfaction there seems little point to be informed that (selecting a page at random) “Chernyshevsky would later assimilate from the Petrashevsky crowd this jumble of Fourier and Feuerbach.” Need I know this in order to be on the lookout for the verbal and stylistic tells of the closet, policy-making objectivist?

There are, I think, bigger fish to fry, or at least catch, in one’s practical life. Personally, I blame Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt for Donald Trump. But I'm open to arguments.

View all my reviews