Posted on 01/05/2005 11:22:24 AM PST by annyokie
EDITOR'S NOTE: 2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of National Reviewpos. In celebration, NRO will be digging into the NR archives throughout the year. This piece by Whittaker Chambers appeared in the December 28, 1957, issue of NR.
Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.
The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This," she is saying in effect, "is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from."
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
The Children of Light are largely operatic caricatures. Insofar as any of them suggests anything known to the business community, they resemble the occasional curmudgeon millionaire, tales about whose outrageously crude and shrewd eccentricities sometimes provide the lighter moments in boardrooms. Otherwise, the Children of Light are geniuses. One of them is named (the only smile you see will be your own): Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian dAntonio. This electrifying youth is the world's biggest copper tycoon. Another, no less electrifying, is named: Ragnar Danesjold. He becomes a twentieth-century pirate. All Miss Rand's chief heroes are also breathtakingly beautiful. So is her heroine (she is rather fetchingly vice president in charge of management of a transcontinental railroad).
So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain's, "all the knights marry the princess" — though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can't fool little boys and girls with such stuff — not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily. The Children of Darkness are caricatures, too; and they are really oozy. But at least they are caricatures of something identifiable. Their archetypes are Left-Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies. (And neither Right nor Left, be it noted in passing, has a monopoly of such dreamers, though the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and labels.)
In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.
"Looters" loot because they believe in Robin Hood, and have got a lot of other people believing in him, too. Robin Hood is the author's image of absolute evil — robbing the strong (and hence good) to give to the weak (and hence no good). All "looters" are base, envious, twisted, malignant minds, motivated wholly by greed for power, combined with the lust of the weak to tear down the strong, out of a deepseated hatred of life and secret longing for destruction and death. There happens to be a tiny (repeat: tiny) seed of truth in this. The full clinical diagnosis can be read in the pages of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Here I must break in with an aside. Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche. Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche's "last men," both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria. And much else comes, consciously or not, from the same source.) Happily, in Atlas Shrugged (though not in life), all the Children of Darkness are utterly incompetent.
So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book's last line, that a character traces in the dir, over the desolate earth," the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the "mysticism of mind" and the "mysticism of muscle").
That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value," "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous "cash-payment."' The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1,168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript:
And I mean it." But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired "naked self-interest" (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment. The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his fife."
Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being" With productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if Man's heroism" (some will prefer to say: human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held "heroic" in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must arise from them. For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact, it is, essentially — a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world's atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls "productive achievement" man's noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.
Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feeling at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.
If any Toni Morrison was on the list,I hope it was The Bluest Eye,a book of immense power and meaning.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not ad hominem, especially when it confirms the point being made. Rand's personal life was marked by a significant rejection of the principles she espoused. Tellingly, the form of her personal rejection takes the form of that "pursuit of pleasure" that Chambers predicted it would take.
Oh, so by trying to 'use' her ideas, that's how you 'realized' that she's a fraud.
No. I attempted to use reason to demonstrate the truth of her assertions (as summarized here, for example). The facts of the real world simply do not permit one to logically reach her conclusions. Instead, one is forced into a long string of assumptions and assertions to justify what she said -- which should never happen with any truly objective system.
Do you have any examples?
Sure. In the link provided, Rand states that:
Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
There are numerous problems with this. First, of course, "pursuit of happiness" is an utterly subjective concept. It is illogical to base an allegedly "objective" moral philosophy on such a shifty thing. After all, what makes me happy probably differs substantially from what makes you happy. Yet an objective "highest moral good" by definition requires that the same principles apply to everybody -- what makes me happy should also make you happy, all the time.
Next, Rand's contentions about reality and the use of reason (see link), demand that our moral reasoning account for what we observe. Among what we can observe are, specifically, the principles of natural selection, which have been embodied in the Theory of Evolution. Indeed, Rand herself appeals to natural selection when it suits her (e.g., her appeal to laissez-fair capitalism.) I suspect that Rand recognized the potential parallels between "nature, red in tooth and claw," and her own philosphy, which is why she attempted to place constraints on the practices of natural selection. But the world we can observe offers no justification for considering these constraints to be absolutely binding.
Third, an appeal to Evolution suggests that "rational self-interest" can be readily interpreted as "whatever I can get away with." The only thing in Rand's philosophy to prevent that is her assertion that we can't do that. But why not? Unaided Reason -- which Rand raises up as our "only guide to action" -- does not offer an objective answer to that question. At best, one can proffer a limited utilitarian argument that cannot answer the question of what happens when somebody does something they're assured of getting away with.
Fourth, inspection of the real world offers no justification for the assumption that it is a moral imperative for man to "exist for his own sake." Indeed, one could more readily and justifiably invoke the Theory of Evolution to state that man must "exist to further the good of the species." Which of course leads to a philosophy that is radically different from the one Rand lays out.
We could go on in this vein for a long time, but you see where it heads.
You also speak of 'her axioms'. Do you know what the three Objectivist axioms are? (since you're obviously against people speaking on things they don't understand)
The three axioms are discussed here, for example. They actually can be debated, and quite vigorously. (Please note that in what follows I'm merely laying out the argument -- I'm not taking any stand on it one way or the other.) For example, Rand asserted that "Man—every man—is an end in himself." And yet the Law of Identity (a thing is what it is) has some rather obvious flaws when applied to individual humans, especially if they're an "end in themselves". Are you "you" before conception? Are you "you" after you've died? And since most of eternity is made up of times when you're not around, and you're constantly changing when you are around, is it really possible to come to any absolute and logical moral conclusions with respect to you? For example, would it be absolutely wrong for me to hasten your departure from the world, or to prevent your fetus from exiting your mother's womb? It is not at all clear that Objectivism can simply assert the Law of Identity as a basis for a moral philosophy -- there is no logical requirement to accept it as an axiom, and it is a simple fact that there are alternatives to it.
Which do you disagree with?
It is not necessary to agree or disagree with the stated axioms, to recognize that Rand's philosophy does not live up to them. Indeed, the ease by which one can demonstrate that fact, is all the proof necessary to conclude that Ms. Rand was, as I've said, a fraud.
(you've accepted the axioms just by entering a conversation, or even just by existing for that matter)
Nope.
Alas, no .... her political philosophy turns out to be a distilled essence of Hollywood ethics. And given the many idiocies spouted by modern libertarians, it is hard to discern which party in your comparison has suffered the worst insult.
You can take anything too far of course, in particular when you try to take your political/economic ideas and make a personal philosophy out of them. Then you are in the realm of gurus, however rational they claim to be. You might as well critique religions on matters of internal logic. Its a pointless exercise.
Libertarianism, in general, is based on the idea of individual liberty as the primary political good, and on empirical observation of politico-economic "best practices". Rand did push on both these fronts, as did Hayek et. al. Rands heroes and heroines got things done, and their enemies were correspondingly incompetent.
I am sure Rand and Hayek and everyone else writing on libertarian theory would have a nice argument on WHY personal liberty is the primary political good - but thats where you have your disagreement with Rand.
You would get in the same trouble if you asked communists to answer WHY the working class deserved to rule.
bttt
That's interesting. Pope John Paul II teaches the same thing ... that human beings can never be treated as means to any purpose other than their own welfare and sanctification. However, from this premise, Christianity posits an opposite course of action to: He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.
We believe that a person must exist precisely for the purpose of sacrificing himself to the needs of others. Depending on his abilities or circumstances, that will sometimes mean serving others, and sometimes being served, but always dying to self.
The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
Christianity teaches that in a world of death, rational self-interest demands that a person love the things of eternity more than the things of time, and that real happiness is found only in loving God and neighbor.
Hey! Where ya been? Happy New Year!
Excellent! I applaud you! You said it much better than I!
Whittaker Chambers is a truely heroic figure unlike, say, Hank Reardon, a work of fiction.
Chambers was instrumental in exposing, and greatly weakening, the communist influence in this country. With him and Buckley there would be no Reagan.
I read 99 percent of Atlas -- up to the arrest of John Galt. I liked it right up until Dagny flies into Galt's Gulch. About then I stopped taking it seriously and figured that as right as she was about the left her understanding of human nature was on par with a female high school junior.
UG says almost exactly the same thing in almost exactly the same words.
Is there a connection here?
Note that list is of the top 100 NOVELS, of which Witness , still in print though it may be, is not.
It seems Chambers had quite a bit of sympathy for the "looters".
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.
Translation - Chambers did not think that socialism was all bad. Further only the ignorant see socialism vs private property rights as a black vs white issue.
According to Chambers a little bit of socialism is OK - right there in the gray area otherwise known as the mushy middle.
Atlas Shrugged is a masterpiece.
Chambers is an idiot.
Chambers is an American hero. Rand is a fraud and Atlas Shrugged is a bunch of babble-speak.
It's so terrific to live in a free society, don't you think?
Bigot. Read up on Chambers. If Miss Rand had stuck by her "principles" I might be able to take her seriously. At least Whittaker admitted he had been wrong-------something you will never see in print that Ayn did.
I have read all (or most) of Rand's works.
It is, in fact, the precisely because this nation was a nation founded under God (however you personally define him), that allowed the individual freedom and explosion of creative thought that made this nation great.
I agree with your view on this.
Even if many of the Founders were not actual Christians, Christianity (Biblical Christianity) had a very strong influence on them.
The Declaration of Independence did not come from Aristotle, but from the Bible.
This is even admitted by one of the Objectivist historians, who admits that Jefferson got the áll men are created equal'from Locke, who in turn, got it from the Bible.
What I did admire about Miss Rand was her love for America and her defense of Capitalism (using Austrian economics as her source)
I think you are making the common mistake of misunderstading what Rand meant by áltruistic'.
She meant giving up a 'higher value'for a 'lower one'.
If a mother loved a child, caring for the child would not be altruistic.
In fact, Rand pointed out that the only people anyone owes anything to is our parents, since they cared for us when we were totally helpless.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.