Random Randian References

Peggy Noonan gets alliterative in praise of Rick Santorum:

He is a Catholic who sees society not as an agglomeration of random Randian individualists but as part of a community, part of a whole.

It's a strangely structured thought. Drop out the part about Randians, and you get:

He is a Catholic who sees society... as part of a community, part of a whole.

That actually does not make sense. Society is part of a community?

Her underlying notion, of course, is that we are individual parts of a whole - that we are cells in the Communal Wholeness. I'm not sure whether "society" in this case is global, national, or the Great Chain Of Being itself.

What first caught my eye was that "agglomeration of random" part, because Rand certainly saw society as neither random nor as an agglomeration. She recognized that cohesive forces are at work in human social life. She thought it was important to be able to defy those cohesive forces on occasion, because sometimes those cohesive forces are taking you in a disastrous direction.

I also wondered about the focus on his Catholicism. I'm not at all sure that Catholicism is really all that associated with the Organic Wholeness of Humanity idea. Catholicism, like most forms of Christianity, takes the individual soul very seriously, but also makes much of family and community in their various forms. Noonan is Catholic, so she may be suggesting that Protestants tend to be more individualistic in their theology than Catholics are.

You might say we're part
of the great web of life,
but somehow the parts
are often in strife.