Caveat Lector

There’s a Republican state senator in Idaho named John Goedde who wants Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged to be required reading in Idaho high schools. In fact, he has introduced legislation to require it. He said reading the book made his son a Republican.

I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago. It was a good book and I enjoyed reading it. But it was a novel, not a true story. It was made-up out of Ayn Rand’s brain. Every character, every event, every detail was fictional. Nothing in the book was real. There is nothing wrong with being a Republican, but the decision to be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a conservative, or a liberal, should rest upon something more solid than a novelist’s imagination.

I cannot imagine myself reading a novel and then putting down the book and deciding that, because of the imaginary story I just read, I’m going to be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Nazi, or a jihadist. I try to base my decisions on reality and facts, not on another person’s imagined version of reality.

The fact that Senator Goedde thinks reading this novel will sway young minds a certain way tells you that he thinks the book is effective propaganda. And in fact, Ayn Rand had an agenda when she wrote Atlas Shrugged and her prior novel, The Fountainhead. Her agenda was to promote her philosophy of Objectivism and her own ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and small government. There’s nothing wrong with promoting one’s ideas in a book, but let the reader beware: enjoy the book; don’t adopt its ideas, whatever they may be, uncritically.

I’ve read many books that might influence young minds. One is Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters, published in 1926. The book chronicles how early scientists tracked down the causes of major infectious diseases and discovered how to prevent and cure them. The book is inspirational and I am sure it has influenced many young people to enter careers in science and medicine. But Microbe Hunters espoused no philosophy. It was about real people and real events and how they made the world a better place.

If a work of fiction changes a person’s identity, or influences someone to a particular course of action, then I would say that person’s education system has failed him. We must operate with eyes wide open, using critical thinking and real-world logic, or we run the danger of operating in a fictional world with rules that apply only to the fiction in our heads. And we won’t even know it. Caveat lector.