This question actually comes from a response to one of my articles. I'm using it because it is an example of a common misunderstanding about Rand. Here is the question:
| "What shall we do with infants? Certainly they should just be aborted or starved to death (or, better yet, never even conceived), for clearly their value is zero, for they do nothing but demand our time, our attention, our resources. Me, me, me. Never mind that no woman should have to endure the pain of childbirth purely on selfish interest alone. The simple fact is that you would not exist if your parents lived out your philosophy to the letter, and neither would mankind, because there is more to life than one's own selfishness. "This is where Ayn Rand breaks down. This is what I could never get from her books. How to explain children and families and mankind? If selfishness were the pinnacle of virtue as she proclaims, then mankind would be doomed."
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I am never quite sure what to make of this criticism of Rand, because I cannot imagine that anyone looks at children as an object of self-sacrifice, or a burden. I know there are people who have that distorted view, but I believe, at least I hope, it is an exceptional one. For the sake of my answer, I'm going to assume it is.
The highest expression of human value is romantic love, the love between a man and woman who find in each other the manifestation or realization of their highest values and that which is the greatest prize of their life. In this life, most love probably does not achieve this ideal, but it is that ideal to which even lesser versions of romantic love aspire.
The intimacy and pleasure that lovers derive and give to each other is a reward for the rightness of their love, and when the product of that intimacy and pleasure is a child, the child is the concretization of their love, the product of that which is only possible between a man and woman enjoying that which only their love gives them a right to.
For some married couples, there may be reasons that children are unwanted, good rational reasons; but for most married couples such reasons are exceptions, and most couples want children. The desire for children is a recognition of the whole nature of what a human being is, and it is our nature that determines what will fulfill us. Raising children is one of the most fulfilling enterprises of human experience, and one of the most rewarding.
That does not mean raising children is easy, or that all of the experience is pleasant, but nothing worthwhile in life is easy, and everything of value only comes with effort, and frequently some pain and disappointment along the way. These are part of reality, and it is reality that Objectivists and individualists live for.
Only someone whose values are range-of-the-moment, with no long-range views could possibly say about children, "for clearly their value is zero." Someone with that view would never work on a garden, for clearly the dirt and ungerminated seeds have zero value. But a child's value is not zero, even from infancy. Tell a loving mother with her baby cooing in her arms her baby has no value.
Ayn Rand On Children
The claim that Ayn Rand never wrote about children, or families, is either out of ignorance or maliciousness. All her writing was for adults, on very serious adult subjects. Families and children were not a primary subject in any of her works, as they are not in many other other writer's works, against whom such criticism is never laid.
Nevertheless, Ayn Rand did write about children and families. Perhaps the most obvious example is in Atlas Shrugged, where she describes the young mother and her two boys in Galt's Gulch:
| The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley--two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child's defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger's ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence. "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. "I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara.... "I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational." [Atlas Shrugged, Part Three--Chapter II, "The Utopia Of Greed"] |
Children In All of Rand's Works
Though children and families are never the emphasis, the importance of moral principles to families and children is constantly referred to throughout the works of Rand. Her emphasis, of course, is on the principles themselves, but she frequently emphasizes the consequences of those principles being violated on real people, which are children and families. There are literally multiple hundreds of references to children and families throughout all her works.
There is, perhaps, no better example of that than her article, "The Comprachicos," from her book, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. The entire article is a discussion of the dangers to children of the educational methods which are truly destroying children's minds.
Children, a Personal Interest
The following are two of Ayn Rand's letters I present as evidence of both her love for children, and her very magnanimous heart, which are both an expression of her philosophy of rational individualism.
| To Mimi Sutton, April 30, 1946 Dear Mimi: I am enclosing the check for Docky, for the month of May. Let me know how she's getting along.
Dear Henry: Thank you very much for the CARE package which you sent to Europe as a Christmas gift in my name. It was a nice thing to do and I appreciate it deeply. I have just received a letter of thanks for the package from a French mother who enclosed snapshots of her four children and told me how much they enjoyed the gift. It was very touching, as she did not complain, but it was obvious that they needed the food very badly.
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[Please use the contact form to submit questions to "Ask Regi." You may ask anything you like, and I'll answer whatever I like--which will be almost everything.]
—Reginald Firehammer (04/14/10)
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