American dreamers suffer from double vision

As half a million men sang and prayed in Washington this weekend in one of the biggest Christian gatherings ever seen in the United States, a smaller, but hardly less fervent group of believers was assembled in a nearby hotel.

They were celebrating a diametrically opposite, but equally American, set of views: the rational self-interest of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

As Mary Dejevsky reports, the contrast could not have been sharper.

Out on the Mall in the sunshine were the men in their jeans and T-shirts with their packed lunches and self-effacing chants of "I have sinned". In the subterranean conference hall were the Ayn Randers, almost 500 of them, in their sharp business suits and bright dresses, asserting themselves and the virtues of self-esteem and self-reliance for all they were worth (which in some cases was millions of dollars).

Atlas Shrugged, the vast philosophical novel the 40th anniversary of whose publication they were celebrating, was seen by its author as her life's work: a moral philosophy in literary form that would underpin and justify the supremacy of reason, the primacy of the individual and the making of money.

It lauds the industrialist, technological advance, and profit - recounting the disaster that would face America and the world if the "doers" and money-makers, feeling unappreciated by their fellow-countrymen, went on strike.

As many speakers this weekend acknowledged, some of the scenarios and details in the novel - including the awe of big machines and technological advance - are dated. One after another, however, they rose to their feet to chart the influence of the work and of Ayn Rand's thought generally on their own thinking and careers. Many had read the book in their teens or early twenties - during the Sixties and Seventies, that is - when it was tantamount to heresy.

Many could cite whole scenes and passages as testifying to the well-springs of America's prosperity as they saw it. Scholars among them lamented what they said was the continued dominance of liberalism on US university campuses and in American intellectual life that had left them marginalised (but hardly poor) in right-wing think-tanks.

The more optimistic suggested, however, that with the fall of Communism and the Left's acceptance and embrace of hitherto right-wing economic arguments, they were less isolated than before.

Rand herself was a ferocious enemy of Sixties liberalism and everything associated with it. She spoke out against the student rebellions on American campuses, against socialism and collectivism, and she attacked what she saw as left-wing bias among film-makers.

Almost from the time she arrived in America, in her mid-twenties, she regarded herself - in her philosophical views at least - as more American than many Americans. She dismissed those who disagreed with her for not appreciating their freedom and the respect for individual rights she believed it to be based on.

Video clips of her later television appearances show an insistent, dogmatic and humourless woman in her sixties, speaking with the quietness of utter certainty. The pitch of her voice was low and despite almost half a century in the United States, she retained a decided Russian accent. That apart, her manner had some affinity with that of Margaret Thatcher. You can almost hear her saying: "There is no such thing as society." She seems never to have done so, but she came pretty close.

To many Americans, Ayn Rand represents - for better or worse - the current of American thought that prevailed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan: a sort of economic Darwinism - selfish, money-seeking and ruthless.

But there is one signal difference, clearly illustrated this weekend. She could never have allied herself with the religious right. She was profoundly secular, dismissing religion in its entirety as "mysticism".

From this weekend's mass prayer meeting on the Mall by the Promise Keepers there wafted these preacher's words, amplified many times over by giant microphones: "When we downsize God, we upsize ourselves."

Indeed we do, could have come the answer from the Ayn Randers, and a very good thing, too. But large numbers of Americans disagree: they want their money, their self and their God, and let the philosophical contradictions to hang.