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 NEVER have and NEVER shall count the pages of a book,in order to determine whether I want to read it or not.But perhaps YOU should reread my post,before you take umbrage at my LAUGHING at the size of LES MISERABLE! I WAS 13 YEARS OLD and by that time,I had probably read infinitely more books,of that caliber,than you've read to date;not to mention the fact that I understood them all and that I read through ALL of Hugo that summer,as well as the required reading from my school.Oh yes,and I've even managed to read some of Hugo's works in the original French,pet. ;^)

Perhaps it is you who suffer from ADD,ADHD,and/or a terminal case of juvenile snottiness.

Exactly
"Uncle Toms Cabin" is full of caricatures too.
As is "The Wandering Jew".

Etc. ad infinitum. Novels as political tracts are nothing new, and on the whole they aren't good novels.

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A non-political example: James Fennimore Cooper wrote some of the worst prose even written (see Mark Twain's essay on the Literay Sins of James Fennimore Cooper to see one of the most searing, scathing, and hilariously funny reviews ever written in the English language), but nitwithstanding that, his story "Last of the Mohicans" as manifested in the Michael Mann film of the same name, is as masterpiece. Compelling characters, epic sweep, historical backdrop, romance, struggle, war, life, death, hatred, revenge... it has it all. (Okay, I admit it, I have a soft spot for Madeline Stowe, too.)

In the original book form, it is a disaster; I you don't believe me, you can believe Twain.

Thers'a rather more common vehicle to lay out philosophical issues, known as an "essay", and somewhere within the vast, elephantine bulk of the novel is a terse, cogent, well-reasoned essay, of about 50 pages or so, just screaming to get out of the literary prison it's currently in. I would have been very interested to read that essay, and I probably wouldn't be nearly as hard on that essay as I am on the novel. Otherwise, as a work of literature, it's really shockingly bad. Star Wars, as bad as it was in a literary sense, at least had the redeeming virtue of being fun, but there is nothing fun about Rand's fiction - she is deadly serious. Poisonously, soporifically serious.

And that's a problem, because the literary flaws of the work eventually come to overwhelm and overshadow the message she wants to convey. I think, and the responses on this thread tend to support me on this, that there are a great many people who, by about page 600 or so, come to conclude that the proper answer to "Who is John Galt?" is "Who gives a damn?" This is a case where the messenger interferes with the message so very badly as to render it indecipherable to a goodly portion of her readership, because a lot of people simply aren't willing to slog through the acres of literary muck to find the pearl hidden somewhere in the sty. And as a result, despite the commonly accepted aphorism to the contrary, this is a case where the messenger really needs shooting, and shooting with great enthusiasm, followed by an unburial so as to shoot the messenger yet again.

It's a tough gig she set up for herself - I don't think there's been a decent philosopher who was also a decent novelist since Voltaire, and Rand failed to break that streak rather spectacularly. Atlas Shrugged is living proof of the truth behind the old saw - basically, if you want to write a novel, write a novel. If, on the other hand, you want to send a message, call Western Union, because the history of attempts to do both in one shot is littered with casualties, Rand being merely one of the more recent. Influential? Certainly, but it's entirely possible to be influential without being a literary masterpiece, as Ayn so ably proves.

No, the point was it was better to live free and not do what you loved then have your abilities and talents used against you to enslave you.

Well, yeah. That point, made repeatedly throughout the novel, is about as subtle as a brick to the head. My concern is not what her point was or whether it was worthwhile or insightful or whatever - what I'm saying is that the method she chose to deliver that point unto thee has more holes in it than a shotgunned swiss cheese.

"Have you read Sam Tannenhaus' biography of Chambers? It is fascinating. Rand was a piker compared to Chambers."

Yes, and Buckley's book about chambers, Red Hunter.(I think that's what it's called.)

Now, if you haven't read Chambers' book Witness, do so.

I read all of Rands books beginning with Atlas Shrugged in late 1964.

The Fountainhead was better as a novel. Most likely because the evils were personified and one could focus on them individually. Atlas Shrugged just has a bunch of interchangeable bureaucrats as the bad guys (accurate, but not dramatic.)

I agree.

I think what also makes it a better read is because the central issue in the Fountainhead (integrity vs compromise) is something the average reader could identify with.

No, the point was it was better to live free and not do what you loved then have your abilities and talents used against you to enslave you. Well, yeah. That point, made repeatedly throughout the novel, is about as subtle as a brick to the head. My concern is not what her point was or whether it was worthwhile or insightful or whatever - what I'm saying is that the method she chose to deliver that point unto thee has more holes in it than a shotgunned swiss cheese.

Well, the written word is pretty powerful.

Tom Paines 'Common sense' and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' were very effective in moving people to act.

Rand's novels seem to have that ability also, maybe because they are so black and white.

"She also got her husband to leave his then-wife-and-family for her. Not much of a role model."

Ahhh .... didn't know this. I've read the book the Cult of Ayn Rand, but I don't recall this gem of a detail in there. What I do recall was that her husband from the very beginning was perfectly content to be witness and non protesting while she did her 'thing' w/ her inner circle, esp Branden.

This husband leaving wife AND kids tid bit ... do you have a source? For it is Rand's relationship to children I have always found to be the key point of focus when discussing her 'philosophy'...

[Sam the sham] Childrearing is altruistic. It is totally subordinating your schedule to the needs of another. I think you are making the common mistake of misunderstading what Rand meant by áltruistic'.
[fortheDeclaration] She meant giving up a 'higher value'for a 'lower one'.
[Doctor Stochastic] Most (if not all) of Rand's critics make that mistake about altruism.

I think Rand should've called it "enlightened self-interest" vs. "self-sacrifice" or "self-abnegation". Instead she named the fight as "selfishness" vs. "altruism".

Thers'a rather more common vehicle to lay out philosophical issues, known as an "essay", and somewhere within the vast, elephantine bulk of the novel is a terse, cogent, well-reasoned essay, of about 50 pages or so, just screaming to get out of the literary prison it's currently in. I would have been very interested to read that essay, and I probably wouldn't be nearly as hard on that essay as I am on the novel.

I thought that about Galt's Speech. She should have just admitted to herself that she was developing a philosophy, and that her new philosophy deserved a non-fictional treatise to introduce it to the world. Then the novel that illustrates the sense of life embodied in her philosophy could blossom as a novel.

Plus, I felt that every page could have been 3/4 its actual length with a little bit of softening up of the sentence structure. But I think she prided herself on her precise, excruciatingly grammatically correct use of English. Which I think partially explains why the dialogue is so stilted as well.

Atlas Shrugged is living proof of the truth behind the old saw - basically, if you want to write a novel, write a novel. If, on the other hand, you want to send a message, call Western Union, because the history of attempts to do both in one shot is littered with casualties, Rand being merely one of the more recent. Influential? Certainly, but it's entirely possible to be influential without being a literary masterpiece, as Ayn so ably proves.

As a novel, I did enjoy The Fountainhead more. But I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned We The Living. That was her best novel <ahem> qua novel, IMO. Maybe it's because she was merely trying to illustrate the reality and essential contradiction of the Communist revolution, and she herself had said that she hadn't developed the philosophy of Objectivism when she wrote it. So her sense of life shines through the novel in a much less forced way, and reveals itself to be much more realistic & humane for it.

I think Rand should've called it "enlightened self-interest" vs. "self-sacrifice" or "self-abnegation". Instead she named the fight as "selfishness" vs. "altruism".

I agree the terminology is hard to deal with.

One has to read her to understand where she was coming from.

One cannot say I love you without the I.

The great enemy she was going against was Kant, who taught that an act is only a virtue when one's highest values are given up.

So a husband must save an unknown woman and allow his own wife to drown.

If he saves his wife (even at the risk of his own life) it is not considered a virtue, but scorned as being 'selfish'.

You can see the roots of Nazi Germany and Communism in that philosophy.

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