Trying to take the next logical step from a position of Rand's

Rand famously stated, at a Ford Hall Forum in April of 1981,

"I do not think that the retarded should be allowed to come near children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something they have to live down to."

- Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981
(_The_Age_of_Mediocrity_, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981).

I am trying to go from here to the next logical step: what a child (or its parents) should do if the child happens to _be_ a handicapped human being — since it is plainly impossible to protect a child from the "spectacle" of itself.
If there is absolutely no way to enable a child to deal with seeing anyone handicapped — Rand apparently thought so — then we'd have to conclude that there's absolutely no way a child who has a handicap can deal with what he or she sees and experiences each day. So ...

/a/
Do you agree with Rand's statement above?

/b/
How do you think Rand would have responded, if the next questioner at that April 1981 Forum had been a child saying: "I use a wheelchair and I'm retarded. Please tell me how to do what you just said"? (It is not hard to imagine that, say, a child of eleven with a mental age of six would be able to understand Rand's statement and ask that simple question.)
Would Rand have merely shrugged? Or what?

/c/
More to the point: Whatever answer you think Rand would have given to such a questioner, would you have given that same answer? Why, or why not? (If your answer would differ, how and why would it differ?)

Post 1

Friday, November 18, 2011 - 5:12am

Kate, some people are "Ayn Rand scholars" i.e., interested in the person and her life, especially as it reflected in the formulation of her school of objectivism (rational-empricism). We do not do that with Wittgenstein, Russell, and Popper. Their private lives were their own. Granted that Ford Hall was not a private gathering, it was in 1981, close to the end of her life. She had cancer, Kate.

However, she said something similar in Atlas Shrugged, near the beginning, when Eddie Willers is remembering the oak that had been felled by lightening and his shock at discovering that it was hollow inside. Children should be protected from the sight of death, Willers thought. But it was stated as at one remove: he had heard somewhere that children should be protected from the sight of death. It was not his own declaration. Perhaps I am offering too nuanced an interpretation.

My question is then, what else should children be protected from? Rand grew up in the city. If she had been farmer's daughter, slaughtering livestock, knowing that wild animals eat each other, harvesting crops, and fertilizing fields, she might have felt differently. We will never know.

It seems incongruous to me that she would advocate "protecting" a child from any aspect of reality.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/18, 5:13am)

Post 2

Friday, November 18, 2011 - 6:32am

Kate,

/a/
Do you agree with Rand's statement above?

Rand's example involved 2 things, Downs syndrome (of any age) and the young. It did not involve Downs syndrome in the young (it was not addressed to the young, or even to Downs syndrome kids). In order to appropriately evaluate her statement, change her example to an example of a severely deformed adult (something the kids could grow up and become). A popular example of a severely deformed adult is Joseph Merrick (the elephant man). Joseph was so deformed that he actually looked more like a monster than like a human being. With that modification, I would agree with Rand and say that children should not be exposed to Joseph Merrick.

/b/
How do you think Rand would have responded, if the next questioner at that April 1981 Forum had been a child saying: "I use a wheelchair and I'm retarded. Please tell me how to do what you just said"? (It is not hard to imagine that, say, a child of eleven with a mental age of six would be able to understand Rand's statement and ask that simple question.)

Would Rand have merely shrugged? Or what?

As I said above, Rand's statement was not directed at children with Downs syndrome.

/c/
More to the point: Whatever answer you think Rand would have given to such a questioner, would you have given that same answer? Why, or why not? (If your answer would differ, how and why would it differ?)

According to the case I outlined -- where you don't get to juxtapose and use the example of the child with deformation -- this is a non sequitor.

However, if Joseph Merrick was a child, and if he was also in my audience, and if he asked me how to do what I just said, I would tell him to love himself greater than any other person -- to build, to create, to make his dreams become a reality. I would tell him about how beautiful he can be as a person, and how the spiritual side of humanity is what makes us both human and great. And, perhaps more to the sentiment behind your questions, I think Rand would answer the same way.

Ed

p.s. I invite you to consider watching both of the Phil Donahue interviews of Rand in their entirety -- in order to see how truly "human" Rand was. You may have a different impression than you can get from a quoted sentence or two.

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/18, 6:45am)

Post 3

Friday, November 18, 2011 - 7:37pm

"Charles Proteus Steinmetz (April 9, 1865 – October 26, 1923) was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electric motors for use in industry. Steinmetz suffered from dwarfism, hunchback, and hip dysplasia, as did his father and grandfather. Wikipedia here

When I was a child, I read a biography of Steinmetz which said that although his given middle name was Heinrich, he was dubbed with the soubriquet "Proteus" by his university classmates as a tribute at once and the same to his phenomenal intellect and also to his non-human appearance.

(Edited by Vorgan the Simulated on 11/18, 7:43pm)

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/18, 7:45pm)

Post 4

Friday, November 18, 2011 - 8:10pm

For the record, I've already watched (and was impressed by) her Phil Donahue and Mike Wallace interviews.

Post 5

Friday, November 18, 2011 - 8:55pm

Mike,

How come your post 3 was edited, at 7:43pm, by "Vorgan the Simulated"? I've never even heard of such a man.

:-)

Kate,

That's cool. I had gotten the impression that you thought Rand was Nietzschean regarding human beings -- i.e., that she looked down on special needs and mentally challenged people, or on bio-physical imperfections in general. There is a subtle distinction here. Rand didn't look down on the imperfectly-formed humans. Instead, she looked down on the exaltation of imperfection -- the worship of it as an ideal for mankind (or at least one of many ideals). In the first Donahue interview, an audience member, assuming Rand was Nietzschean, asked Rand if she thought of herself as perfect. Rand answered that she doesn't think of herself in those terms, and instead talked about moral integrity in general.

There is great insight in her use of the sentence: "I don't think of myself in those terms."

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/18, 9:02pm)

Post 6

Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 7:29am

An interesting side point is that among her favorite literary works were Cyrano, Notre Dame and L'Homme qui Rit, all of them with deformed (artificially in the last case) but gallant characters. She had a boy in a wheelchair in Think Twice. Among these characters only Quasimodo is mentally defective, which is what she was talking about in the original quote.

Post 7

Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 11:00am

Indeed! Who is Vorgan?

Post 8

Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 1:11pm

Peter makes an excellent side point. There is also one of her favorite Hugo novels, The Man who Laughs, where the hero is deformed and the woman who loves him is blind. Given the extraordinary degree to which this novel's form is metaphorical, it speaks volumes to Rand's agreement with looking past mere appearances to find the essential values.

Post 9

Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 5:25pm

The Man Who Laughs = L'Homme qui Rit.

Interesting point. I had not considered it in Rand's own favored readings. I did not read The Hunchback of Notre Dame. However, I have seen a clip of Lon Chaney as Quasimodo's defense of his position against the attackers and it seemed cogent to me.

If pressed, she might say something about the difference between Romantic fiction and political necessity, but she was not so pursued, so we will never know.

Humans are complicated and highly intelligent humans all the more so. Reconciling all of Ayn Rand's opinions on every topic might require some tolerance (in the geometric sense), or for lack of a nicer phrase, some "wiggle room."

TSI: See the Technology topic for my insights into HTML tags.

Post 10

Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 4:59pm

What does "TSI" abbreviate, please?

Post 11

Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 7:29pm

TSI = Teresa Summerlee Isanhart, though she prefers to be called "Tress" by her friends.

Post 12

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - 4:02pm

Mike, you waded through a bunch of code so you could make the edit say "Vorgan??" LOL. ;)

Post 13

Thursday, November 24, 2011 - 10:47am