Man in the Place of the Gods

WHO SAYS SECULAR PEOPLE CAN’T BE SPIRITUAL?

What do cities mean to you?

Excitement? Dreams and goals? Glamor? Escape? Danger? Romance? Artistically planned parks, zoos and museums? Shopping? Ohmygod skyscrapers and bridges?

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue?

From Aristotle to Ayn Rand, writers have analyzed and gloried in cities as the greatest expression of Man the rational builder and inventor. Architecture, especially, makes the city the temple of Rational Man.

Frederick Cookinham is a New York City tour guide, specializing in New York’s colonial and Revolutionary history and in “AYN RAND’S NEW YORK.”

In THE AGE OF RAND Cookinham taught you to see the landscape through “history glasses.” Now learn to see cities through “temple glasses.” See the spiritual in the secular! Be uplifted by the sight of Man’s achievements. Make the city your temple to Man’s mind, and don’t be afraid to “get all Ayn Rand” about it. Appreciate better the deeper meanings behind the concrete (and steel!) facts of where you live.

“Analysis and insight on Ayn Rand’s life and work, embedded in a guide to New York’s architecture and public art, wrapped in a paean to cities: how they work and what they mean to us.” – Victor Niederhoffer, NYC Junto

PRECÍS

This book (a bit of “light extemporanea” as Ben Franklin would say) shows how the city, and New York City in particular, embodies Ayn Rand’s Hellenistic man-worship, in architecture, public art, advertising, the media, and the whole Twenty-first Century way of life.

I start by comparing cities to temples. I describe what a temple is and the role it plays in our moral and psychological lives. Then I show how Man and the city take the place, in our time, of gods and temples.

I focus on the New York Stock Exchange, on Grand Central Terminal, on Rockefeller Center, on Battery Park, and on other New York City institutions that have demonstrated an ability to grip the imagination of the general public, and especially the tourist and the immigrant. I show how movies do a great part of this transformation of (literal) concrete to abstraction, to legend, to symbol, and to inspiration.

In The Age of Rand, I used the expression “a new and deeper meaning” over twenty times. I continue that theme here. In Man in the Place of the Gods, landfills become magic mountains, parks become the scene of nature giving meaning to cities and vice versa, and rivers become narratives of the births of cities and of Man’s creative genius.

I let the reader into three private mental/moral closets of my own that relate to cities: a blue place, a bridge, and a tower.

I discuss musical impressions of cities.

Chapter 1

WHAT IS A TEMPLE?

You have been told that your body is a temple. Your doctor, or your gym teacher, meant that your body is sacred and deserves to be kept in tip-top shape. In Anthem, Ayn Rand writes “For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and undefiled.”

The word “temple” comes from the Latin “templum,” which comes from the Greek “temenos,” which comes from “temnein,” meaning to cut. The ancient high priest would cut a furrow with a plow around in a circle or square, to mark out a sacred enclosure. That acre or ten acres or however big it was would be the place cut apart from the rest of the tribe’s land, and into which the tribe would bring its statues of gods. In the sacred enclosure they would build buildings to house and protect their gods, and there observe the auguries. Around that sacred enclosure a city would grow, beginning with the market.

The “temple” you have between your eyes and ears also comes from Latin, but it may not go back beyond Latin to Greek. Webster is silent on its origin. But perhaps it too comes from the Greek temnein, since it is a space marked out by your eye, your ear, your crown, and your cheekbone.

“Contemplate” means “with templum.” Since a temple was a “space marked out for the observance of auguries,” to contemplate must have meant to gather with others in the temple to contemplate the auguries together, or perhaps it meant to gather with others to focus on a common object, with everyone sitting with their index fingers pressed to their temples.

A temple is the most important building in your life. Whatever, to you, is a temple, is in effect a temple to you.

In ancient times, a temple was a building where a statue of a god was kept, protected from the weather and thieves and invaders, and to that god in his temple you would bring offerings. These offerings got to be called “sacrifices,” but as Ayn Rand would point out, a “sacrifice” means the giving up of a greater value in exchange for a lesser value or a non-value, and that is decidedly not what your ancestors had in mind when they brought a bushel of wheat to the god. It was not a sacrifice; it was a straightforward business transaction. You offered wheat or olive oil or some other commodity to the god in exchange for something you wanted. Good weather and a bountiful harvest would be at the top of the list, along with victory in battle, or recovery from disease or injury, for yourself or a loved one. Gods have magical favors to give out, but you have to pay for them. That is why your ancestors came to the temple and offered offerings and prayed. “Pray” means “ask.”

But today we no longer believe in propitiating supernatural powers with burnt offerings. We do, however, go places to look at things. Not to look at them and appraise them for buying, and not to learn from those things for college credit, but we look at these things for some kind of intangible reason. If the place is called an art museum, we are looking at the paintings and sculpture in order to be uplifted. It’s still a transaction, of sorts – we pay admission to the building hoping to get something out of the visit. But what we get is an inward experience. We don’t call it worship. We call it art.

A market is a place where people gather to buy and sell. So if a temple is a place to buy favors from the gods, then a temple and a market are at base the same thing. Jennifer Burns wrote truer than she knew when she titled her book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

We can also use a whole city as an art museum, and gain inward uplift from what we see in the cityscape. We can get that for free.

We can feel proud of our ability to see more in the scene than others can, just as the novice is proud to be chosen to be the acolyte assigned to extinguish the candles at the end of the worship service. We feel proud to be in an exclusive group. But the spirit of today’s increasingly Objectivist world (we’ll come back to that point in Chapter 2) is non-exclusivity. Bigger fortunes are made by the Henry Fords with their millions of inexpensive Model Ts than by the Mercedes’s with a few luxury cars. We in the 21st Century now understand that we all benefit from the uplift of all. Let me therefore charge a dollar or two for a book designed to help readers new to Ayn Rand become just as adept an acolyte of the worship of Man and his cities as you are.