Big Sister is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand)

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.

I read "Atlas Shrugged" twice - not because it was so good, but because I was trying to figure out what it was that attracted anyone to that literary trash.

About halfway through the second reading, I decided it was like a lot of movies you see where you think - maybe - it's going to get better, but it never does.

I decided I could live my life without ever knowing John Galt.

At least one of her characters (I believe the Aristotlian philosopher) was working as a short order cook.

Well, sure - if you're going to set the cook up as a font of Oracular Wisdom, it won't do to have him be Joe Schmoe, fry cook. No, he must be The World's Greatest Living Philosopher, who can then properly bloviate about why the mystery motor's inventor has vanished from the face of the earth. He is the Hidden Buddha, found dispensing sagacity in the place where you least expect him to be. Of course he's working some menial job - the Hidden Buddha isn't very hidden if you find him in the stacks at the library, is he? It's a standard plot device, repeated ad nauseam year in and year out - the same device whereby Crazy Joe the Homeless Guy teaches everyone the True Meaning of Christmas, coming up next on a Very Special Episode of ER, or some such. And who didn't see that coming a mile away? I don't want to keep seeing the same hands, now...

Well,you know what's said about Gunga Din,don't you? LOL

At 16,I had been through ALL of Dickens,Twain,Dumas pere&fils,Shakespeare,and so on. I read "ANTHEM",in my sprint through Sci-Fi/fantasy from Heinlein, to Huxley to Bradbury,to Orwell and more. Rand was not only found wanting,but extremely wanting! When I liked one book,I usually read EVERYTHING else an author had written,so though I wasn't crazy about "ANTHEM",it wasn't horrid.I tried to read "THE FOUNTAINHEAD" and "ATLAS SHRUGGED"...never being able to finish either.And at that age,I finished books I hated. There was NO way I was going to finish either of those boooooooooooooooooring,nonsensical,verbose,books.

I just don't understand the fascination some people have with Rand and her 10th rate fiction.

Yeah, I did the same thing.
I just made myself hang in hoping there was something I missed that would justify my time.

I've never read anyone who was more ponderous and repetitive! It was like being punished to read it!
I was back in the first grade again writing on the blackboard, "I will not throw spitballs" one hundred times!

There has got to be something in a person's psyche that attracts them to an endless barrage of meaningless words and phrases which will be repeated with different meaningless words and phrases for twenty pages.

It's a lesson in human psychology to study the posts of people on FR who think she is some kind of literary goddess. They also post with the same verbosity and inane phrases.

Sigh!

I was hoping not to get sucked up into this.....

I have read all of Rand that has been published, including all of her non-fiction Objectivist Screeds, and I have read them more than once.

I find myself agreeing with many things said here, and, therefore, disagreeing with many others.

If you have not read Rand, please confine your objections to generalizations.

These are facts about Rand:

1. She was an atheist.
2. She was disgusted by Libertarianism (it is not objective).
3. Marriage, to her, was a form of hero worship. Of course you have time for your mate and of course you have time for your children. Remember, children are one of the most selfish things you can do (philosophically and biologically)- hardly altruistic.
4. Her heroic characters were designed to be the highest Man could achieve. Why would anyone want to read a book about the average schmuck (like me)?

She tried to systematize a way of life into a "philosophy" that could be followed by anyone who wished to strive for the best in themselves.

Now, having said those complimentary things, I will say that I don't think she was a good writer. I think this is because the story she was telling must be consistent with Objectivism, and that forced consistency led to some silly, and somewhat theatrical, things creeping into her novels. Plus, I admire her for writing in a non-native language, but I can see many instances when the language is stiff, probably because English was not native to her.

60-70 years later, here we are on a conservative forum vehemently squawking about her on both sides. Doesn't that say a lot for the power of her works? I don't think they will go away any time soon.

I've read Victor Hugo, all his works that have been translated. They are great books, though they invariably leave you crying at the injustice.

Ayn Rand listed Hugo as one of the greatest romantic authors ever. If you are going to count the pages to determine if a book is readable, then I suggest you are either reading for the wrong reasons or suffer from an attention disorder.

Note that list is of the top 100 NOVELS, of which Witness , still in print though it may be, is not.

You are correct; I didn't notice that in my haste to find a "top 100" list.

But back to my point, I'm pretty sure Rand's works have outsold (total number of copies) Chamber's by a wide margin, regardless of which genre in which they respectively worked. In that sense, Rand is arguably more influential as an anti-communist writer than was her critic Chambers. The fact that she's on the top 100 Novel list twice is still as powerful statement about the importance of her fiction works.

Perhaps someone knows how to find total unit sales of their respective books, and can post it.

Thanks for the correction.

Nobody "sucked you in"..you wanted to unload,so you did.

If you had paid even the slightest attention to what I wrote,you would have seen that I (as well as others on this thread,who don't like her work,nor her "philosophy") have read her books;or tried to.

Just WHAT is so "complimentary" about someone being an atheist,a sef-centered,immoral B...h ?

Are you a parent? For most people,there is little "selfish" about having and raising a child/children;NOTHING!

Marriage is a form of "HERO WORSHIP" ROTFLMSO

Rand's a lousy writer,her characters are cartoon stick figures,her prose ennui inducing and so dry and dusty,that one dies of thirst from reading it;that is,if one isn't put to sleep first.And even though writing in a language other than her mother tongue,by the time she wrote those horrors,she had been speaking English long enough to be quite fluent and at ease in it!

Rand didn't write her fiction,which some her mistake for fact,in the '30s nor the '40s,but in the '50s...so your math is seriously OFF.

We're discussing her and her abysmal works,because a BRAVE man and an intelligent one (read the article!),long ago wrote a critique of her (gack,gag,puke) most famous books.It has now been posted to FR and as is our wont,FREEPERS saw the thread,many read the article,and are posting our opinions. That's all.that's it,no more and no less. And the ONLY other tome Rand is ever discussed here,is when one of her drooling sycophants decided to talk about her and her rubbish.The rest of us would just as soon ignore her and her body of pathetic drivel.

The plot manages to be simultaneously leaden, yet ludicrous, as Rand v e r y s l o w l y introduces a series of increasingly improbable and ridiculous plot points over the course of 1100 pages. The characters have all the depth and dimension of paper cutouts, where cartoonish heroes resembling extremely vanilla versions of Mighty Mouse battle with exceptionally banal villains, who spend most of the book rubbing their hands in glee and twirling their handlebar moustaches in the very best Snidely Whiplash tradition.

For a moment there I was sure you were describing the screenplay for the first Star Wars movie.

Yes, Rand wrote in stilted style and in "Atlas..." the characters were characatures, but since it was intended as a vehicle to lay out philosophical issues, I can forgive her, just as I forgive Lucas for the Saturday Matinee quality of the characters in "Star Wars." Both are about good and evil, and both paint them in starkly black and white terms, literally so in "Star Wars." Neither are masterpieces in a purely literary sense, but both had an immense influence on American society.

I'm pretty sure Rand's works have outsold (total number of copies) Chamber's by a wide margin, regardless of which genre in which they respectively worked. In that sense, Rand is arguably more influential as an anti-communist writer than was her critic Chambers.

Be careful of equating sales with influence. I wouldn't be surprised if Left Behind eclipsed them both.

Despite that, Atlas was influential and, overall, for the good. Chambers, however, is a true hero.

I have read it and did an interperative psychological analysis on it in college. Barf. What a sophomoric tome.

Your post 10 above said you never got to the end
of the book.

Why don't you try reading it now when hopefully
you have matured enough not to be bored with
an intellectual challenge.

First, she did not believe life began in the womb" Where did she think it began? In some objectivist birth tank?

There are those who believe that human life does not begin until after birth.

That was the basis of Roe vs Wade.

"... she saw an unwanted child as a form of slavery, based on the conditions that most women endure in third world countries" Even more insanely tyrranical female wasn't she?

???

Interesting point, and true enough.

The US declaration of independence makes assumptions that are not necessarily obvious, even if they are ascribed to God. Other people with different traditions, and as great a belief in God, have come up with different ideologies.

Libertarianism - the idea that individual liberty is central - was pretty much a foundational piece of American culture, so native that the natives had trouble noticing its presence, and the degree by which the US was unique in the world. If you are a fish, perhaps, it is hard to notice the water.

Foreigners however did notice. Which is why I think all the first writers on libertarianism as a political philosophy were not American.

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