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FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944–1957
Lane was unconvinced. Calmly she told Rand, “you have perhaps
shown me that I am a collectivist.” But she simply couldn’t believe that
all human action should be or was motivated by self-interest. If that was
the case, Lane asked, why did she herself oppose Social Security? Lane
opposed Social Security because she thought it was bad for society as a
whole, “which I can’t deny is a do-good purpose.” But opposing Social
Security on “do-good” rather than self-interested grounds was not, Lane
thought, inappropriate. Lane also rejected Rand’s atomistic view of the
world, recalling her frontier childhood to illustrate human interdependence.
She described a typhoid epidemic in her small prairie town:
“People ‘helped each other out,’ that was all. . . . It was just what people
did, of course. So far as there was any idea in it at all, it was that when
you were sick, if you ever were, the others would take care of you. It was
‘common neighborliness.’ . . . The abnormal, that I would have thought
about, would have been its not being there.” She concluded, “There IS
a sense of ‘owing’ in it, of mutuality, mutual obligation of persons to
persons as persons.” 58 Lane saw charity arising naturally from human
societies. What bothered her was the coercion involved in government
programs like Social Security, not the underlying moral principles they
refl ected. But it was just these underlying moral principles that Rand
opposed.
As she wrote to Lane, Rand groped toward an explanation of how
and why they differed. Both women agreed they were operating from
different assumptions. Rand told her, “that is why I intend to write a
book someday, stating my case from basic premises on.” 59 Through
their letters it became clear that Rand and Lane did not share the same
understanding of human nature on either an individual or a social level.
But these differences lay under the surface, for Rand had not yet explicitly
formulated her moral and political philosophy. For instance, Rand
told Lane, “now of course I don’t believe that there is any ‘natural’ or
instinctive human action. (I won’t try to state my reasons here—that
would have to be a treatise on the nature of man.)” This was a belief
that Paterson shared but Lane did not. Presented without benefi t of the
treatise she hoped someday to write, Rand’s ideas came across to Lane as
assertions of dubious validity. Even Rand recognized this, acknowledging
that her letters to Lane were a poor vehicle for communicating her
complete philosophy. She asked Lane, “Do you know what I’ve written
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