The Code of the Creator

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The Code of the Creator

David Kelley

I have spent a good deal of my professional career studying the philosophy of

Objectivism, including the Objectivist ethics, as a system of principles. That

system was laid out most fully, with the greatest breadth and rigor, in AtlasShrugged and in Ayn Rand’s later philosophical essays. From this standpoint,

it is a natural temptation to look back on The Fountainhead as merely a first

attempt, a preliminary sketch of the system.

As I thought about The Fountainhead on the occasion of its fiftieth

anniversary, however, and as I reread the book for the first time in many

years, I tried to put my knowledge of Rand’s later work to one side. I tried to

approach the novel as a naive reader, the kind of reader who might have

bought the book in 1943, curious to see what this new novel of ideas was all

about; the kind of reader that I myself was at the age of sixteen, when I first

picked up the book, having heard vague reports that it had something to do

with individualism, atheism, sex, and other things that were on my mind at the

time.

What struck me when I approached The Fountainhead in this way

was how complete it was, how perfect an expression of the moral sense and

sensibility that has drawn so many people to Objectivism. To explain what I

mean by this, I need to begin by saying a few words about the concept of a

moral sense.

Moral Sense

A moral sense is the whole constellation of values, ideals, and moral rules and

principles, that govern our evaluations of ourselves and others. Our moral

sense determines the content of our judgments about what is proper or im-

proper, what is fair or unfair, what is deserving of praise or blame—on the job,

in family life, in politics, or any other realm of action. It determines the content

of our conception of a good person, of a hero or a saint, an ideal to be emu-

lated. It determines the content of such emotions as anger, pride, remorse,



244 The Literary Art of Ayn Rand

guilt, respect, and admiration—the so-called moral emotions, so-called be-

cause they presuppose the use of ethical concepts such as good and bad, right

and wrong, worthy and unworthy.

Particular aspects of a moral sense can be formulated explicitly as

principles. And in theory, it would be possible to express the whole content of

a moral sense explicitly, in language. But this would be an enormous under-

taking because of the enormous complexity and comprehensiveness of a moral

sense. The normative concepts involved are extremely abstract. They are

integrated in complex ways into moral rules and principles, hierarchies of

values and virtues. They are tied to reality, and thus gain their meaning, from

countless experiences in our own lives, from the stories of moral heroes and

villains we learn in childhood, from the daily rain of moral pronouncements

issuing from the pulpit, from the media, from movies and books.

This is why art, and specifically literature, has always been the pri-mary means of conveying a moral sense. One can learn a great deal about the

conventional moral sense of ancient Greece, its dominant ethos, by reading

Plato and Aristotle, but it is Homer who gives us the full sense, the personal

reality, of that ethos. In the same way, the Christian ethos is best conveyed

through Augustine’s highly personalized Confessions, or Milton’s epic poem

Paradise Lost . Ayn Rand herself observed that normative abstractions

. . .are almost impossible to communicate without the assistance of

art. An exhaustive philosophical treatise defining moral values, with

a long list of virtues to be practiced, will not do it; it will not convey

what an ideal man would be like and how he would act: no mind can

deal with so immense a sum of abstractions. . . . There is no way tointegrate such a sum without projecting an actual human figure—an

integrated concretization that illuminates the theory and makes it in-

telligible.1

If it is difficult to convey a conventional moral sense, an outlook that

is widely accepted within a given society, think how much more difficult it is to

propose a fundamentally new moral sense and to convey it with enough clar-

ity, enough breadth, enough detail, for us to grasp it as a moral sense—that is,

as a distinctive way of thinking, feeling, and acting, across the whole range of

a human life. This is what Ayn Rand accomplished as a philosopher and a

novelist. The Fountainhead is her first full presentation of this moral sense.A reader who approaches the book from the standpoint of the con-

ventional ethos in our own society would be struck by how fully Rand en-

gages that ethos, how deeply she challenges it, how radically she transforms

it. At least, that’s what struck me on rereading the novel, and I know that it is

what bowled me over at the age of sixteen. So here I want to discuss the



245The Code of the Creator

moral sense of The Fountainhead, the moral sense which I am going to call

the code of the creator, and the way this new moral sense relates to the

conventional ethos. I want to show how you get here from there.

Ayn Rand sometimes wrote as if conventional ethics were defined by

a single outlook antithetical to hers: the morality of altruism. I think the truth is

somewhat more complex than that. Our conventional ethos, the moral sense

dominant when The Fountainhead was published and still dominant today, is

made of various strands that emerged from different sources historically, and

are concerned with different aspects of human life and experience. I am

going to spend some time at the outset describing what I think are the three

most important of these strands, what I will call the religious, the aristocratic,

and the bourgeois ethics. Then we will return to The Fountainhead , and see

how it relates to each of them.

The Conventional Ethos

Achilles and Jesus

As a point of departure in describing the conventional ethos, let us consider

the seven cardinal virtues of medieval Christianity: moderation, courage, wis-

dom, justice, faith, hope, and charity. The first four virtues on this list—mod-

eration, courage, wisdom, and justice—are derived from the Greeks; they are

the four virtues described in Plato’s Republic, and the Greek conception of

them can be traced back to Homer. Faith, hope, and charity, by contrast, are

the theological virtues derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition, specificallyfrom the New Testament of the Bible.

This is not a consistent list of virtues, despite the heroic efforts of

medieval philosophers to reconcile them. For example, wisdom is a virtue of

reason, the ability to integrate one’s experience coherently and arrive at sound

judgments. It is flatly inconsistent with the Christian concept of faith as a kind

of intellectual humility, the willingness to believe without demanding reasons

or the evidence of the senses. Again, justice is the virtue of giving each man

his due; it is based on the concept of the earned, and presupposes the willing-

ness to pass judgment on others. It contradicts the Christian emphasis on

mercy, and the doctrine “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” which are ele-

ments of the virtue charity. Even in the case of moderation, there is a differ-

ence to be noted. Moderation for the Greeks meant self-discipline, the strengthof the soldier who forgoes comfort and indulgence for the sake of glory. It did

not involve the asceticism practiced by many Christians, who took a much

more hostile view of the pleasures of the flesh.

But the most important difference between the Greek and Christian




virtues is the one that Friedrich Nietzsche called attention to. Temperance,

courage, wisdom, and justice are aristocratic virtues, emblems of nobility, suc-

cess, and power. Like the Latin word “virtus,” from which our word “virtue”

derives, the Greek “arete” denoted the valor, the manly virtue, of a warrior

like Achilles. By contrast, the religious ethic emphasized passivity: accep-

tance of suffering, submission to God’s will, faith in the judgment of God and

hope for a better life hereafter. Christians associated virtue with the poor,

with those who suffer, with those oppressed by the mighty of the world. Thus

where the Greek conception is elitist, the Christian is egalitarian. The themes

of passivity and egalitarianism are best expressed in the Beatitudes, where

Jesus says:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. . . .

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. . . .

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for

theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5: 2–10)

Despite the differences and tensions between them, these two con-

ceptions of virtue have coexisted in Western culture for a long time, and they

still exist side by side in the conventional moral sense. On the one hand, aris-

tocratic courage, cunning, and discipline, the command of self and others. On

the other hand, religious charity, meekness, sacrifice, the brotherhood of man.

On the one side, the heroic figure of the proud and fearless Achilles. On the

other side, the saintly figure of Jesus, who walked with the rabble and died fortheir sins. The conventional ethos admires both heroes and saints.2

Tribal Ethics

The aristocratic and religious elements of this ethos have long coexisted, de-

spite their differences, because they are both tribal ethics. For a tribal ethic,

the group is the unit of existence and value; it is the group as a whole that

faces the challenge of surviving and flourishing. The individual’s primary rela-

tionship is to the group, for he cannot survive or flourish outside it. Both the

Greek and the Christian ethics emerged from a background of actual tribal

life, the life of nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers, and clans engaged inprimitive agriculture, where the individual’s survival did indeed depend on the

group. Without the technology to protect himself against nature, he could not

survive in isolation. Without trade, travel, or emigration across the boundaries

of the clan, he could not survive by forming his own voluntary society. Hence



247 The Code of the Creator

it is not surprising that in primitive tribes, ethical practices largely serve the

purpose of promoting the solidarity and the interests of the group.

The concept of virtue, in particular, is associated with the regulation

of self-interest for the sake of the common good. This is obvious in the Chris-

tian ethos, which explicitly commands self-sacrifice and humility, turning the

other cheek, giving rather than receiving. The Greeks, for their part, never

advocated altruism in anything like the Christian sense. But their virtues none-

theless had a tribal focus. Courage and moderation were the virtues of war-

riors who protected the group by risking their lives in combat. And their re-

ward was glory, the approbation of their peers. The heroes of the Iliad and

the Odyssey, as well as historic leaders like Alexander the Great, were quite

explicit that this was their motive.

A point of particular importance is that in this primitive mode of exist-

ence, there is a more or less fixed amount of wealth available. There may belean years and fat years, but the fruits of the hunt and the harvest do not

continually increase over the long haul. It is thus natural for people to assume

that the distribution of wealth is a zero sum game, with one person’s gain

being another’s loss. The only way to expand the pool of goods available is by

conquest. Hence the emphasis placed on the virtues of the warrior. Within the

tribe, morality is concerned largely with the equitable division of goods. In this

context, the individual’s desire for gain is perceived as a threat, and the will-

ingness to sacrifice, or at least to limit one’s claim to one’s fair share of the

common pool of goods, is naturally regarded as a major virtue.

Bourgeois Ethics

In fact, wealth is not a static quantity. It may be expanded through economic

exchange and technological progress—a fact that became increasingly clear

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period, there

emerged a new ethic, distinct from the aristocratic and religious outlooks. The

virtues involved were those of the bourgeoisie, the people of the towns, who

prospered by trade rather than conquest, and whose position was based on

contract rather than aristocratic privilege. The new ethic was based, in part at

least, on a recognition that wealth is not a fixed quantity but is created through

exchange. Comparing the landed aristocracy with the new merchant class,

Daniel Defoe put it this way: “an Estate is but a Pond, but Trade is a Spring.”3

The cardinal virtues of the bourgeois ethic are tied to the require-ments of trade and commercial success. These virtues include honesty and

fairness in business dealings, the keeping of contracts and respect for prop-

erty. They include what might be called the facilitating bourgeois virtues—

reliability, courtesy, and punctuality—which grease the wheels of commerce.




They include frugality and thrift in the use of money, and more generally

enterprise and industry in one’s work.

The most famous expression of the bourgeois ethic is Benjamin

Franklin’s Autobiography. As a young man, Franklin conceived “the bold

and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”4 To that end, he distilled

from his reading and experience a list of thirteen virtues as a way of defining

for himself the content of moral perfection. Among these virtues were the

following:

Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your

business have its time.

Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail

what you resolve.

Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e.,

waste nothing.

Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful.

Cut off all unnecessary actions.5

The interesting thing about such virtues is that they are concerned

with the production of wealth rather than its distribution. They are concerned

with the profitable use of one’s time, money and other resources, rather than

one’s relation to other people. These virtues have no real counterparts in the

aristocratic or religious conceptions; they pertain to a realm of activity thathad been morally invisible before.

Summary

The conventional ethos, then, is made up of three identifiable strands—the

aristocratic, the religious, and the bourgeois—Achilles, Jesus, and Ben Franklin.

An unlikely trinity, to be sure, but it gives us the coordinates of conventional

morality, the latitude and longitude of the conventional virtues. Despite the

contradictions among these strands, they all contribute to the normal reader’s

sense of how one should behave, what values one should live for, what sort of

person is admirable. The point I want to make about The Fountainhead isthat it speaks to every aspect of this ethos, and provides a comprehensive and

internally consistent alternative to it. In her later work, Rand tended to reduce

her opponents to a single axis, the mystic-altruist axis. The villains in Atlas, for

example, tend to be one-dimensional variations on this theme. In The Foun-

tainhead , there is a greater variety of character types. She seems more




attuned to the different elements in the conventional outlook of her readers.

She employs many of the symbols and endorses many of the virtues associ-

ated with the strands I have described. But she gives all of them a radically

new meaning, a new place in her vision of the meaning of life and the heroic

potential of human nature. So let us turn at last to the book itself.

The Ethics of Individualism

Ayn Rand said that the theme of The Fountainhead is “individualism versus

collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul. . . .”6 I want to comment on

three specific aspects of this theme, as it is embodied in Roark’s character

and his interactions with the other figures in the novel, especially Peter Keating,

Ellsworth Toohey, and Gail Wynand. Roark is a man of independence, he is an

egoist, and he is a creator, a paragon of productive achievement. These threeconcepts—independence, egoism, and achievement—are the key to under-

standing the moral sense of The Fountainhead , and the ways in which it

differs from the conventional ethos. The novel gives us a completely new

understanding of the meaning and moral significance of these concepts.

Independence

Let us begin with the issue of independence versus dependence. Rand makes

it clear from the outset that independence does not consist in nonconformity.

Henry Cameron says to Roark, “I wouldn’t care, if you were an exhibitionist

who’s being different as a stunt, as a lark, just to attract attention to himself.It’s a smart racket, to oppose the crowd and amuse it and collect admission to

the sideshow.”7 Later on, we meet a number of artists, protégés of Toohey,

who are engaged in precisely that kind of racket: the writer who did not use

capital letters, the painter who “used no canvas, but did something with bird

cages and metronomes,” and the like. When Toohey’s friends asked him how

he could support such rabid individualists, he smiled blandly. He knew that

these “iconoclasts” were merely playing off conventions, for the sake of shock

value; they were just as dependent on others as the most abject conformist.

And most of them, like the writer Lois Cook, had a smirky kind of awareness

that they were getting away with something, foisting trash on a credulous

public (306–7). (I sometimes think that Andy Warhol got his ideas from these

passages of The Fountainhead .)Real independence is a trait of mind. It is a commitment to one’s own

perception of reality as an absolute standard of thought and action. This is

what disturbed most people about Roark. His primary connection was to the

world, not to other people. His convictions, his artistic judgments, his commit-




ment to his goals, were not filtered through any awareness of what other

people thought or felt. It was not rebelliousness; it was indifference. “‘You

know,’” said the Dean, when Roark explained why he did not wish to be

readmitted to Stanton, “‘you would sound much more convincing if you spoke

as if you cared whether I agreed with you or not.’ ‘That’s true,’ said Roark. ‘I

don’t care whether you agree with me or not.’ He said it so simply that it did

not sound offensive, it sounded like the statement of a fact which he noticed,

puzzled, for the first time.” (26)

Keating, by contrast, is an instrument who registers every twitch and

nuance in his social environment. Rand describes his chronic fear of “that

mysterious entity of consciousness within others,” (67) which he spends his

life trying to appease and control. “Always be what people want you to be,”

he says to Roark at one point (262). Keating takes great relief when he no-

tices that Guy Francon is putting on a pretense for his, Keating’s benefit (42).It means that Francon too is a man of the tribe, with the same predominant

orientation toward the consciousness of others. When Keating first proposes

to Dominique, “he spoke rapidly, easily; he was lying now, and so he was sure

of himself and it was not difficult.” (182) A lie is an effort to manipulate the

consciousness of others, a goal that comes naturally to Keating. Though he is

an intelligent man, not without some decency, he is fundamentally incapable

of being honest, because the concept of truth—the grasp of reality by his own

mind—is foreign and frightening.

Roark’s independence is the source of his heroic strength. As I noted

earlier, the conventional ethos has always admired strength and the aristo-

cratic virtues associated with it, especially courage. Since the Enlightenment,

moreover, courage and strength have been linked to independence, the mentalstrength to stand alone against the crowd. Ayn Rand is not the first writer to

portray a man of integrity who fights for his ideals against popular opinion.

But she was the first to affirm that independence is not a matter of whether

one agrees with others. It’s a matter of whether one’s mental functioning

agrees with reality, whether truth is one’s goal and logic one’s method. For an

independent person, the sheer fact of what others believe or value is of no

concern because it is not relevant to truth. Independence, in short, is a form of

rationality. The concept of independence names the same phenomenon as the

concept of rationality, with a special emphasis on the fact that reason is an

attribute of the individual, a faculty that must be exercised and directed by

one’s own autonomous choice.It is interesting to note that rationality is not a virtue endorsed by any

of the strands that make up the conventional ethos—not in the full-blooded

sense that Rand intends. The religious ethic, of course, is actively opposed to

rationality; it commands faith and reliance on authority. The Greeks, for their

part, considered wisdom a virtue, but their conception of wisdom always con-




tained a conventional, conservative element. The wise man is one who em-

bodies the accumulated wisdom of the group. “Wisdom” is not the term one

would use to describe a scientific genius, a brilliant artist, an innovator in any

field. But these, for Rand, are the highest exemplars of rationality.

Independence, then, is one major element in the moral sense of The

Fountainhead . By linking independence to reason, Rand severed its associa-

tion with subjectivism, with the arbitrary impulses of the iconoclast, with the

dark realm of Dionysian passion. Conversely, by linking reason with indepen-

dence, she gave it a romantic quality as a tool of creative freedom, not a

constraint. I am going to return to this last point in discussing her view of

creative achievement. But first, let us turn to the issue of egoism and altruism.

Egoism

Rand’s defense of egoism is the thing she is most famous for, and it is the

second major element I want to discuss about the moral sense of The Foun-

tainhead. I noted a moment ago that the nature of Roark’s independence

gives a distinctive quality to the portrayal of him as a heroic figure, an embodi-

ment of strength and courage. But now we come to a much more striking

difference. The conventional ethos is prepared to admire the aristocratic vir-

tues of strength and courage only if they are combined with the religious

virtues of humility and service. This is pattern we find in the stock hero of

popular culture, from Ivanhoe to Terminator Two: the knight in shining armor

(or the knight of shining armor, in the case of T II), who rides to the rescue of

the weak, the poor, the dispossessed. This is not what we find in The Foun-

tainhead .

Howard Roark is an egoist who blows up a building—and not just any

building, but a housing project for the poor—because his design for the project

was altered against his will. Ellsworth Toohey, the apostle of altruism who

preaches kindness, unselfishness, humility, forgiveness, the equality and broth-

erhood of men, is portrayed as a scheming power-seeker who explains to

Keating that the purpose of everything he has been preaching is to subjugate

all to all, to give humanity “one neck ready for one leash.” (640) In these

ways, among many others, The Fountainhead is calculated to outrage the

altruist sensibilities of the conventional ethos.

At the same time, however, the novel transforms and recasts the

issue of egoism versus altruism. On the one hand, Roark does not fit theconventional picture of a selfish man. His integrity, his loyalty to his principles

and artistic vision, is so profound that he turns down the commission for the

Manhattan Bank Building rather than accept any modification in his design,

even knowing that the loss of the commission will mean that he will have to




close his office and go to work on a construction gang. Yet when he is asked

how he can be so fanatical and selfless, he answers: “That was the most

selfish thing you’ve ever seen a man do.” (198)

On the other hand, it is interesting that none of Roark’s antagonists,

who illustrate different aspects of “collectivism in man’s soul,” is a practicing

altruist. Toohey does engage in some acts of apparent altruism. He gives

away a hundred thousand dollar bequest (222). He appears in court to defend

Stephen Mallory, who tried to shoot him (245). But it is clear that these are

mere stratagems in Toohey’s quest for power. Gail Wynand also seeks power,

but goes about it the old-fashioned way. He is a very nearly pure embodiment

of the aristocratic ethos, an Achilles of the yellow press, whose intelligence,

courage, discipline, and single-minded pursuit of his purpose are presented in

a favorable light. But he neither preaches nor practices altruism. Peter Keating,

finally, is the conventional man on the make. He wants wealth, fame, andstatus; he will do anything to get them. On his way to the top of the architec-

tural profession, he maneuvers to get his colleagues fired. He is partly respon-

sible for the death of Francon’s partner, Lucius Heyer. He uses Roark’s de-

sign, without acknowledgment, to win a prestigious competition. He lacks any

shred of integrity.

What Toohey, Wynand, and Keating have in common, what makes all

of them collectivists in soul, is that their primary purposes involve other people.

The central values they seek in life depend on the values, beliefs, and feelings

that others happen to have. Toohey and Wynand want power, not as a means

to some higher purpose, but as an end in itself; they live for the sake of

engendering fear, submission, and obedience in the consciousness of other

people. What Keating wants is approval, by whatever standard the approversmay choose to employ. He wants superiority over others—by whatever stan-

dard of ranking the world has adopted. Even his desire for wealth is largely a

desire to spend money in ways that impress others. Catherine Halsey, who is

the only practicing altruist in the book, starts out as an idealist but is corrupted

by her own ideal: she soon becomes a petty tyrant of a social worker, and

comes to resent poor people who succeed without her help. She becomes

dependent on the existence of suffering and the gratitude of the sufferers.

In their various ways, these characters illustrate Rand’s rejection of

the idea that the central question in ethics is the question of who gets what,

who benefits. She rejects the view of the self as essentially a recipient of the

goods that the tribe can dispense. The self in her view is essentially an agent.It is “the thing that thinks and values and makes decisions,”as Dominique puts

it in a conversation with Keating (426). This is why the self is to be preserved

and honored. This is why Roark’s integrity is selfish: he is loyal to the convic-

tions and values that make him the person, the individual, the self that he is.

In this respect, Rand’s argument against altruism is that it is not com-




patible with independence. “The man who attempts to live for others,” says

Roark in his trial speech, “is a dependent,” (681) and the same is true of the

person who seeks to rule others—or gain their approval. The virtue of inde-

pendence applies to the choice of ends as well as means. It is only when we

are free of each other in this way that we can deal with each other as inde-

pendent equals.

And it is only on these terms that genuine kindness and mutual re-

spect are possible. For example, Austin Heller is struck by the fact that Roark

has no fundamental need of him, yet when Roark praises one of his articles,

he “felt the strangely clean joy of a sanction that was neither a bribe nor

alms.” (136) Rand goes out of her way to distinguish kindness and sympathy,

which are compatible with respect for their object, from pity, which is not.

When the sculptor Stephen Mallory first meets Roark and bares his anguished

soul, he “looked at Roark and saw the calmest, kindest face—a face withouta hint of pity. . . .it did not bear the cast of the hungry soul that feeds upon

another’s humiliation.” (329) Later in the novel, Keating shows Roark the

paintings he has done in a futile effort to recapture the artistic impulse of his

youth. Roark tells him it is too late, and is “sick with pity”; Roark wonders at

“this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of final-

ity, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling. . . .” (583–4)

Rand’s point is that the altruist ethic, by making pity for suffering the touch-

stone of virtue, treats man as a metaphysical incompetent and dependent.

Achievement

I said a moment ago that Rand views human beings primarily as agents, not as

recipients. That is true, but it is too abstract. She views human beings specifi-

cally as creators and achievers. If one’s primary relationship is to reality, not

to other people, as independence requires, then one’s central purpose must be

the creation of value in the world. This is why Roark describes his morality

not as the code of the egoist but as “the code of the creator.” (682) And it

brings us to the third and final key element in the moral sense of The Foun-

tainhead : Rand’s view of productive achievement.

The altruist ethic, as we have seen, was based partly on the view of

wealth as a fixed, static quantity available for distribution. The surprising thing

is the perpetuation of this view into an industrial age, when wealth is continu-

ally being expanded through production and trade. Economists have knownfor two hundred years that economic exchange is not a zero sum game, in

which one person can gain only at the expense of someone else. Yet the

conventional ethos has not fully grasped this fact.




“Men have been taught”[said Roark]“that the highest virtue is not to

achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been

created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be noth-

ing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of

any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-

hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who

made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an

act of achievement.” (682)

The needs of the creator were partly recognized by the bourgeois

ethic. The bourgeois virtues, as we have seen, are largely concerned with the

creation of wealth through production and exchange. In this respect, the bour-

geois ethic permitted and even endorsed the pursuit of self-interest. Yet its

endorsement of self-interest was partial and it was tepid. Observed SamuelJohnson: “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently em-

ployed than in getting money.”8 This is a far cry from the aristocratic ethos,

which looked down its nose at trade, and an even farther cry from the Chris-

tian view, which held that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of

heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But Johnson’s

remark also contains a subtle barb. To say that money-making is innocent is

rather faint praise.

In a fascinating work called The Passions and the Interests, Albert

Hirschman describes a tendency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to

regard self-interest as a bulwark against the heroic passions for religious sal-

vation and military glory. Salvation and glory might be noble ends, it was felt,

but the passions they inflame lead to irrationality, civil strife, and bloodshed.The pursuit of self-interest, by contrast, leads to peaceful and productive ex-

change among people. It relies on calculation and reflection—the calm exer-

cise of reason rather than passion. Indeed, tranquillity of mind appeared on

Franklin’s list of virtues. In effect, the bourgeois ethic retained the ancient

attitude that commerce is not a particularly worthy or heroic activity. It is

safe, it is useful, it is sober and respectable. But there is nothing exalted about

it, nothing in it to engage a sense of moral idealism.9

This is one reason why so many artists and intellectuals of the nine-

teenth century were hostile to the bourgeois morality. D. H. Lawrence, for

example, wrote a sneering attack on Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,

complaining: “Either we are materialistic instruments, like Benjamin, or wemove in the gesture of creation, from our deepest self.”10 In fact, this is a

false dichotomy—indeed, a whole series of false dichotomies—regarding the

act of creation: that it is the product of emotion as opposed to reason, of free

imagination as opposed to facts and logic, of spiritual values as opposed to

materialistic ones.




But Lawrence and his ilk were merely perpetuating assumptions that

exponents of the bourgeois ethic themselves embraced. The romantics were

right in feeling that the bourgeois ethic lacked any sense of passion and exal-

tation; that it had no place for courage, daring, imagination, heroism, or indi-

viduality. In The Fountainhead , Austin Heller describes Roark’s passionate

experience of his work as “a combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture

and sexual ecstasy.” (253) It is impossible to imagine Benjamin Franklin de-

scribing himself in those terms. The writers of the eighteenth century stressed

the benefits of production, but they described the creation of wealth from the

outside, in economic rather than personal terms. They never identified what is

common to the act of creation in all its forms, the common thread that unites

the artist, the scientist, the inventor, and the merchant. They never celebrated

the originality and daring involved in commercial enterprise.

The great achievement of The Fountainhead is that it transcendsthis opposition between the bourgeois and the romantic sensibilities. Rand

was a romantic realist in her ethics as well as her aesthetic theory. She saw

reason in romantic terms, as the source of man’s creative powers and imagi-

native freedom, not their enemy. She brought a sense of grandeur, of exalta-

tion, to the act of productive achievement.

In the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Foun-

tainhead , she notes that religion has had a monopoly on the concepts of

exaltation, reverence, and worship—concepts that have “the emotional con-

notations of height, uplift, nobility, . . . grandeur”—concepts that refer to “the

entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal.” (viii–ix) Her

ambition was to give these concepts a secular and individualistic meaning.

While other humanistic moralities tried to secularize the altruist content of religion, Rand secularized its spiritual elevation.

To pick one of many examples from the book, consider her descrip-

tion of the Enright House:

The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with

the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm,

living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments—a pur-

poseful human will. It made the house alive in a strange, personal way of

its own, so that in the minds of spectators five words ran dimly, without

object or clear connection: “. . .in His image and likeness. . .” (308)

As a product of Roark’s effort, the building partakes of the qualities of its

creator: it is a distillation of Roark’s life, his will, his mind. Invoking the phrase

“in His image and likeness” from the book of Genesis, Rand invests the hu-

man act of creation with the awesome grandeur and power of God’s act of

creating the world.




Conclusion

Ayn Rand’s view of productive achievement is the core of her ethic, the point

that ties together everything else. Since achievement is the product of reason,

rationality is a virtue. Since reason is a faculty of the individual, it requires

independence. Since achievement is the creation of value, it requires a valuer

whose primary purpose lies in the world, not in other people. And if we value

what is created, then we must accord equal value to the creator. We must

honor the self—the thing in us that thinks and values and makes decisions, the

Prime Mover within us, the fountainhead of our actions—as a thing never to

be sacrificed or subordinated.

This new moral sense embraces all that is good in conventional mo-

rality. It incorporates all that is admirable in the aristocratic ethos—strength,

courage, pride, self-discipline—but it holds that the proper function of thesevirtues is the conquest of nature, not the conquest of men. It incorporates all

that is appealing in the religious ethos: kindness and mutual respect; disdain

for the snob and the status-seeker; a vision of the brotherhood that is possible

among men. But it holds that these things are possible only to men of self-

respect and independence. And finally, of course, Rand accepts those virtues

of the producer that the bourgeois ethic recognized, but she gives us a much

deeper, fuller, and more inspiring appreciation of the moral significance of the

act of production.

The new moral sense conveyed by The Fountainhead represents

the final emancipation of ethics from its tribal roots. It completes the process

begun by the bourgeois recognition that wealth is created, a process that was

left unfinished by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. “Civilization,” says Roark,

“is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is

public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting men

free from men.” (684–5) The Fountainhead was the first announcement to

the world of a fully civilized ethic.

Notes

1 Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” in The Romantic Manifesto, 2nd rev. ed.

(New York: New American Library, 1975), 21.

2 The symbolism of Achilles and Jesus was suggested to me by Donald McCloskey, “Bour-geois Blues,” Reason , May 1993 <http://reason.com/9305/Mccloskey.html>. For

Nietzsche’s critique of the religious ethics, see his Genealogy of Morals.

3 Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, 2nd ed. (1730; New York: Augustus M.

Kelley, 1967), 100. For other classical expressions of this point, see Milton L. Myers,

The Soul of Modern Economic Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 16.



257 The Code of the Creator

4 J. A. Leo LeMay and P. M. Zall, eds., Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Norton Critical

Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 66.

5 Ibid, 67–68.

6 Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), 68.

7 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; New York: Signet, 1993), 64. All further page refer-

ences will appear in the text.

8 Boswell’s Life of Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), Vol. I, 567.

9 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1977).

10 D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York:

Thomas Seltzer, 1923), 30.

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