Human Horticulture—a Missing Link for Objectivism?

 

Let me begin with a puzzle.

Atlas Shrugged ends not with withdrawal from the world but with the promise of return to it.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy champions human life — not life as a biological fact to be tolerated, but life as a value to be celebrated, pursued, and extended into the future. Her heroes are creators and achievers, yes, but they are also, at their core, people who say yes to existence: yes to reason, yes to happiness, yes to the kind of world in which human flourishing is possible. Atlas Shrugged ends not with withdrawal from the world but with the promise of return to it — with John Galt tracing the sign of the dollar over a landscape waiting to be rebuilt. It is, for all its darkness and struggle, a profoundly life-affirming vision.

If you look at the demographics of the Objectivist movement, something puzzling emerges.

And yet, if you look at the demographics of the Objectivist movement, from its founding in the early 1960s through the decades that followed, something puzzling emerges. Ayn Rand had no biological children. Nathaniel Branden, her designated intellectual heir and the movement’s most prominent public spokesman, had no children with Barbara, his first wife and Rand’s close friend, nor with any of his subsequent three wives. Leonard Peikoff, who inherited the mantle after the 1968 Split and became the official custodian of Rand’s legacy, had one daughter — born during his second marriage, after Rand had passed away, when he was in his fifties. If we count Rand, the Brandens, and Peikoff as the movement’s founding triumvirate, their combined average comes to approximately 0.33 children per person — a bit below the replacement rate of 2.1, one might observe.[1]

The pattern extends, with notable exceptions, through the upper tiers of the movement’s leadership and into its general membership. For a philosophy that champions life, there is a curious paucity of new life being brought into the world by its most committed adherents.

This is not, I want to be clear, an accusation. It is a puzzle. People choose not to have children for many reasons, some of them entirely reasonable: economic circumstances, health considerations, the recognition that not everyone is suited to parenthood, the simple fact that some people find their deepest fulfillment in other forms of creation and contribution. None of these reasons is inherently anti-life or anti-Objectivist. I am not arguing that Objectivists should be compelled or guilted into having children — which would be a straightforward violation of their individual rights and an act of psychological manipulation that egregiously disrespects their autonomy.

But when a pattern is this consistent, across this many people, over this many decades, at this many levels of a movement, it stops being a collection of individual choices and starts being a cultural symptom. Something in the water, as it were. And the philosopher who trained me to ask “Oh? Why not?” when confronted with a “you can’t” also trained me to ask “Why?” when confronted with a persistent pattern that seems to contradict the values the pattern-makers explicitly endorse.

The puzzle, then, is this: why does a philosophy of life produce a culture of chosen childlessness? And what does that tell us about the gap between what Objectivism teaches and how it is lived?
 

Rational Animals in the Real World

The demographic puzzle I described in the previous section does not exist in a philosophical vacuum. It has a context — and that context is, ironically, one of Rand’s own most important and most frequently stated convictions.

Rand spent considerable energy attacking mind-body dualism as one of the great philosophical catastrophes of Western civilization. She traced it back through Descartes and Kant, through the Christian tradition, ultimately to Plato — the view that the real self is the mind or soul, that the body is at best a vehicle and at worst a prison, that the truly human thing about us is the part that transcends our animal nature rather than the part that expresses it. Against this tradition, Rand insisted that we are a unity — that there is no ghost in the machine, no disembodied intellect riding around in a biological chassis. We are, in her phrase and Aristotle’s before her, “rational animals.” Both words matter equally. Strip out the rationality, and you have an animal without the means of survival that distinguishes human beings from other creatures. Strip out the animal, and you have a fantasy — a disembodied intellect that does not and cannot exist in the world as it actually is.

This is one of the things Rand got genuinely and importantly right, and it connects her to the best of the Aristotelian tradition she drew on. The problem is what happened to it in practice.

Look at the heroes of Rand’s fiction — the people she held up as embodiments of the human ideal — and you will notice something. Howard Roark builds buildings. Dagny Taggart runs a railroad. Hank Rearden makes metal. John Galt invents a motor. Francisco d’Anconia manages a copper empire. These are magnificent achievements, and Rand renders them with genuine grandeur. But children? Nurturing? Teaching? The patient, unglamorous work of forming the next generation of human beings? These activities are largely absent from the heroic tier of her fictional world. When children appear at all in her novels, they are incidental. When teaching appears, it is typically the dramatic transmission of a fully formed philosophy to a receptive adult — not the slow, repetitive, often thankless work of helping a young person develop into someone capable of forming their own views.

This is not, by itself, a philosophical error. A novelist is entitled to write about the characters and situations that interest her, and Rand’s interests ran to grand productive achievement rather than domestic life. The problem arises when the implicit hierarchy of value in the fiction — mind over body, achievement over nurturing, creation over reproduction — gets absorbed into the movement’s culture as though it were a philosophical position rather than a literary preference.

And it did get absorbed that way. The unwritten message, transmitted through the fiction and reinforced by the movement’s leadership by example, whether intended or not,[2] was that the truly heroic human activity was intellectual and productive achievement, and that biological and nurturing activities were, if not contemptible, at least secondary — appropriate for those who were not quite heroic enough for the higher calling. Having children was what ordinary people did. Creating railroads and buildings and philosophical systems was what Objectivists did.

Beneath this lifestyle difference is a genuine philosophical problem.

Beneath this lifestyle difference is a genuine philosophical problem: an unmistakable instance of the mind-body split that Rand explicitly rejected. To treat the mind’s achievements as the measure of human worth and the body’s imperatives — including the impulse toward biological continuity, toward nurturing, toward the formation of new human beings — as beneath the philosopher’s serious attention is to do precisely what Rand accused Plato and Descartes and Kant of doing. It is to disown half of what we are.

A culture that implicitly disowns the animal side of its rational animals will find that side reasserting itself — in the form of the demographic puzzle I noted above, in the form of personal lives that do not quite match the philosophy’s stated values, in the form of a movement that preaches life while quietly choosing not to perpetuate it. What we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves — what we push into the Jungian “shadow” — does not disappear. It shapes our behavior in ways we do not consciously choose, often producing exactly the outcomes we most wanted to avoid. A movement that refuses to take seriously the animal dimension of its rational animals will find itself haunted by that refusal.

The resolution, I want to be clear, is not to guilt anyone into having children or to elevate biological reproduction to the status of a philosophical imperative. It is simply to take seriously what Rand explicitly said about the nature of human beings — that we are a unity of mind and body, that both dimensions of our nature are real and important, that a life fully lived engages both rather than elevating one at the expense of the other. Human horticulture — the patient work of nurturing other human beings toward their own flourishing — is not a lesser calling than building a railroad or writing a novel. It is, in its own way, an expression of the same values: the belief that human life matters, that human potential is worth investing in, that the future is worth caring about.[3]

 

Human Horticulture and a Full Human Life

The various people who helped and nurtured us along the way were, in their quiet way, as heroic as anything in Atlas Shrugged. They were doing the patient, attentive work of helping another human being grow toward their own flourishing, their own best selves. Not imposing a direction. Not demanding a particular outcome. Not requiring the person they were nurturing to become a copy of themselves or an apostle of their own views. Just investing time, attention, knowledge, and genuine care in someone whose potential they recognized and decided was worth cultivating.

It is one of the most consequential things a human being can do.

This is not a secondary activity. It is not what you do when you are not quite heroic enough for the higher calling of inventing new metals, running railroads, or writing philosophical systems. It is one of the most consequential things a human being can do — because human beings, unlike bridges and novels, grow and change and go on to do things that their cultivators never anticipated and could not have produced alone. (My trombone teacher, for instance, did not make me a musician. He gave me the tools and the model, and I made myself a musician. But without him, I would not have had the tools or the model, and the musician I became would not exist.)

The Objectivist movement, at its best, has always known this. Rand herself was formed by teachers and thinkers who invested in her — the Russian intellectual tradition she absorbed as a young woman, the American philosophical culture she encountered when she arrived in this country, the editors and friends who helped her develop as a writer. Nathaniel Branden, for all the complications of his later relationship with the movement, was for a decade one of the most effective intellectual cultivators in the history of American philosophy — not because he imposed Objectivism on his students, but because he helped them think more clearly and honestly about their own lives and values. His lectures on the psychology of self-esteem reached people who would never have picked up a philosophy textbook and changed how they understood themselves.

The problem was not that the movement lacked people who could do this work. The problem was that the movement’s implicit hierarchy of value — its unspoken sense of what counted as truly heroic achievement — consistently underrated it. Creating a symphony ranked higher than teaching music. Writing a philosophical treatise ranked higher than helping a student think through a difficult argument. Building a business ranked higher than raising children who would go on to build businesses of their own. The makers were celebrated. The cultivators were largely invisible.

This is a false hierarchy, and it is one that the philosophy itself does not support. Given Rand’s explicit rejection of mind-body dualism, Objectivists all should understand that human beings are not self-sufficient intellects who spring into existence fully formed and then operate in isolation. We are social animals, in Aristotle’s precise and non-collectivist sense: beings whose flourishing depends essentially on living among others, sharing knowledge, dividing labor, forming the kinds of relationships in which genuine growth becomes possible. The polis, the community, is not a threat to individual achievement. It is its precondition.

Every serious thinker I have known has been formed by other serious thinkers who invested in them.

Every serious thinker I have known has been formed by other serious thinkers who invested in them. Every musician I have known who became genuinely excellent had a teacher who cared enough to push them. Every philosopher I know who has done original work has had colleagues and friends who took their ideas seriously enough to argue with them honestly. As Randall Collins exhaustively documents in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, the solitary genius is a myth. What actually produces intellectual achievement is a community of mutual investment, in which people take each other seriously enough to challenge, encourage, and occasionally hand each other exactly the right book at exactly the right moment.

The Objectivist movement could have been that community. In its best moments, in certain times and places and among certain people, it was.

The Objectivist movement could have been that community. In its best moments, in certain times and places and among certain people, it was. What prevented it from being so more consistently and more broadly is another story. But the counter-example, the refutation of Objectivism as all too often advocated and practiced, is in all of the people, often seemingly quite ordinary people, doing the unglamorous work of human horticulture, producing results that no railroad or philosophical system could have produced alone.

Howard Roark built the Stoddard Temple. But someone built Howard Roark. He did not spring, fully formed, from inert, place-holding parents and teachers — yet they are absent from The Fountainhead.

 

Practicing What Objectivism Preaches

What troubles me, when I look honestly at the movement that I have been part of for six decades, is the gap between what Objectivism teaches and what its culture has too often practiced. A philosophy that champions human life, rational achievement, and individual flourishing should produce a culture in which human beings invest generously in each other — in which the next generation of thinkers is formed with the same care and seriousness that went into forming this one, in which biological and intellectual reproduction are both understood as expressions of the same fundamental value: the belief that human life is worth perpetuating and worth improving.

Instead, the movement has too often produced something closer to its opposite — a culture of chosen sterility, intellectual and biological, in which the most important thing was to protect the purity of the existing philosophy rather than to grow it, and in which having children was somehow less heroic than writing treatises about the heroism of the childless.

The resolution I have arrived at, after six decades of living inside this puzzle, is not a grand institutional reform. It is personal, and it is simple: focus on your own life and your own happiness. Be your own hero. Do the work that is yours to do, and do it as well as you can. If you see another hero along the way — someone doing serious intellectual work, someone investing genuinely in another person’s growth, someone following an argument honestly wherever it leads — salute them. Don’t worship them, don’t follow them uncritically, don’t surrender your judgment to their authority. Just salute them and keep moving.

This is, I think, what Rand actually meant — what she meant at her best, before the movement she founded calcified around her and turned her insights into dogma. She meant for people to live, fully and seriously and with full engagement with all of what it means to be a rational animal. The rational part and the animal part. The achieving part and the nurturing part. The producing part and the reproducing part.

All of it, held together in the kind of integration that she called, at her most philosophical, the harmony of the soul and the body, and the rejection of any doctrine that puts us at war with ourselves, or estranges us from what would make us a more complete and a more alive human being. That, in the end, is what a philosophy of life should be for.

 

Notes

[1] Alan Greenspan, part of the original “Collective,” died recently at age 100, with zero children. His first wife, Joan Mitchell, and her second husband, Allan Blumenthal (Nathaniel’s cousin), both Collective members, also died recently and also had no children. The same is true for Mary Ann Rukavina Sures. (These were the Inner Circle members most loyal to Rand at the time of her split with the Brandens. As an addendum to her 1968 article, “To Whom It May Concern,” Peikoff, Greenspan, Blumenthal, and Sures all signed a statement breaking with the Brandens personally and with their lecture organization.)

[2] The tendency of enthusiastic followers to emulate their leaders and heroes should not be discounted. Rand was reportedly somewhere between disdainful and horrified to observe, during the early days of the Objectivist movement, that some of her fans were wearing black capes with dollar sign brooches and sporting long cigarette holders. No one told them to do this, any more than they told them not to have children. But between Rand’s own life choice of childlessness, exemplified by all of the heroes and heroines of her novels and adopted by her Inner Circle as well, and her vigorous advocacy of the right to abortion, it should surprise no one that some of the young women of the 1960s who idolized her also patterned themselves after her in this respect, as well as in more superficial respects. Also, the rise of feminism and Women’s Liberation during this period no doubt reinforced the pattern.

[3] Vinay Kolhatkar and I write about this in Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization (Ethics International Press, 2023). See Chapter 4, “Deep Meaning and the Fullest Life” (especially “Generativity and Legacy,” pp. 128 – 32), and Chapter 5, “The Ethics of a Humane, Meaningful Life” (especially “Being Humane,” pp. 156 – 58). Also see Kolhatkar’s essay on the four orders of humaneness (in particular, the fourth order): https://www.thesavvystreet.com/being-truly-humane-the-four-orders-of-humaneness/.