| | Sarah,
Are we talking about the same thing? I don't think so, but I will address your thoughts anyway:
To start with, I am long past a certain type of intellectual snobbishness of looking down on any genre and insinuating that it is superficial. If a "lost but now I'm found story" is a good one, then I identify with it. Sincerely, I have several from my own life. This does not just include the emotional impact of finding an organized set of ideas that corresponded to many of my own previous independent judgments over time, this also includes serious drug and alcohol addiction. Socrates said "know thyself." I personally have had to learn me the hard way. You see, I know how so very serious and painful being lost is - and what a relief it is to be found. When this is an actual experience, it is a wonderful feeling.
(Of course, there is an awful lot of melodramatic superficial schlock out there. I don't think this applies to Eve's story, though. I found it to be quite touching, since I identified strongly. Have you read The Romantic Manifesto - particularly Art and a Sense of Life? Or thought about Nathaniel Branden's Mutnik principle with literature like Eve's article?)
I will even go one step further in this line of reasoning. There is a wide range of emotions that is practically the monopoly of religious experience: devotion to a higher power, the "lost but now I'm found" feeling, the practice of prayer, empathy for suffering, benevolence toward all people in general, a sense of belonging, and the list goes on and on.
These are powerful drives within the human psyche. Objectivism has not addressed most of them in an organized manner. You can get a sampling in Ayn Rand's fiction, especially as she was such a brilliant mood creator and character craftsman. There her ideas spring to both rational and emotional life. They touch some strings in readers that religion normally usurps.
One of the absolutely amazing things about Solo is that with all the personal bickering and baseness (and yes, vulgarity - I even admit to a sporadic attraction to that persuasion), it is a sense of the exalted that is appealed to in reader's souls. There is nothing cheap about that feeling. From my perspective of coming back to the USA after a 30 year absence, I see that this is what has been missing in Objectivism for such a long time. You can now get it somewhere else other than The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. You can get it here. People like Eve write about it.
As to the rest of what you said, I get the notion that you are objecting to something you sense in my praise of Eve'e article that takes away from personal responsibility. It is not there, but I certainly share your concern, so I see where you are coming from.
When you touch the "religious" emotion nerve, you are dealing with powerful social organizing and personal mind-numbing capacities. If you don't watch out, an Objectivist hymn book, baptisms, formal missionary work, crusades in stadiums and a whole lot of similar activities will pop up. How about tithing? (If that ever happens, remind me to found the Universal Church of Rand as one of the Bishops! //;-)
Ah yes, there is the deification of Ayn Rand. That has actually occurred in many people, but doing so severs the emotional ties of the practitioners to such an extent that they repress both "religious" emotions and other normal everyday living emotions. They become Randroids, devoid of all social skills and enmeshed in rationalizing all the time. It would be interesting to explore exactly why that happens - Ayn Rand leaves the human race in a person's mind and becomes an icon on an unattainable pedestal, and then the person also leaves the human race and becomes unhappy. Hmmmmm...
Back to Eve. As an Objectivist, I admit to liking the forbidden fruit of the tree of emotional knowledge that she so brilliantly served up. I believe that others liked the taste too. Sanction.
Michael
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