Who's Afraid of Burns and Heller?
Just as one studies history to place modern phenomena in a broader and meaningful context one studies biography to draw parallels in human livess to and change one's view of man's life from a pre-coneceptual to a conceptual one. One needs to integrate a large number of concretes to study the lives of nations and of men.
Look at the history of Rome compared to our history. Rome faced a crisis of faith, a collapse of the traditional morality. The birth rate of the old Roman families plummeted while barbarians not schooled in traditional Roman culture flourished. Compare this to the demographic collapse of the modern West. Rome faced inundation from the Levant and a tide of violent cults and messianic religions. Look at the Arabicization of modern Europe. Even Prince Charles is all but a convert to Islam. Under Diocletian there was a series of "reforms" that could be right out of Atlas Shrugged, or out of Barack Obama's Acorn/Moveon.org game plan. Do you think it helps or harms the aims of statists for people to know their history and to be armed with the knowledge of such parallels?
And how about our own individual lives and the major life-issues we face? Should we have children? Adulterous affairs aren't illegal. But are they good? What if we have the consent of our spouse? Is a sexless marriage worth preserving? What are the implications of a romance with someone half your age? Can you argue someone into loving you? Will you regret having an abortion? How about drinking and drug use, however "mild"? Is there any chance that smoking will kill you? Are friendships and relationships something that one invests in because although they are hard they are rewarding? Or is friendship a loyalty test where one decides to cut people off once they have used up their share of wrong answers? And how do you learn the answers to such questions without having to make all the same mistakes yourself?
Of course Rand's life is not the only source for this type of example. One has the personal example of older friends and family for instruction. Even fiction like The Fountainhead and sitcoms like The Simpsons can convey ageless truths. How many of us remember thinking as that a school year was an eternity as a child, only to find at forty that the last twenty years have passed in an instant? How many other such truths can we become familiar with if we listen to those who have done it all before us? Ninety-nine percent of culture is the passing on of knowledge that comes too late to benefit the old and seems too close to fantasy for the young to believe it.
I shouldn't have to repeat it. No, the philosophical validity of Ayn Rand's politics and the value of her epistemological insights are not affected by whether or not she threatened to sue far too many people in the Nineteen Seventies. But there is something to be learned by looking at her life as a life. And if nothing she may have done in her private life is all so scandalous, then it seems odd to be so insistent that we not hear anything about her because it supposedly isn't shocking. Burns and Heller's biographies of Rand should provide some concretes fact of interest to those who follow Rand's philosophy for living on earth. Biography is history on the scale of the individual life and I am not aware of anything less relevant for us to study than that.
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