Posted on 01/05/2005 11:22:24 AM PST by annyokie
Whittaker is not just a hero but a really great writer...
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So you haven't read anything by her?
I have read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She is an egregious writer, imo. Very shrill. Not unlike screenwriters today. I don't need to beaten over the head with a point of view.
What Chambers was saying is that naked materialism was the common denominator.
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?
If you accept a world with no God but materialism, as Rand did, you operate on the same premise as Marx, even if you diametrically oppose all of his solutions to the human condition.
Chambers is calling the materialistic premise wrong and therefor Marx AND Rand wrong.
I happen to agree with him.
The hostility to humanity's most basic urge, procreation, always struck me about Rand. None of her women were mothers.
The problem is that it is simply not possible to put yourself first and be a halfway decent parent at the same time. So children in the World of Rand are pure evil because they require altruistic sentiments and behavior that compromise the heroic self-sufficiency of her Supermen and Superwomen.
"Festival of Rand-haters" ping
Agreed. If one is a nihilist or in Rand's case an "objectivist" there is nothing more important than oneself. There is no room for children or marriage since that would call for sacrifice of the all important "self" and that self's wishes and desires.
I saw an excellent unauthorized film version of We the Living. It was made in Italy during WWII on the premise that it would be useful as anti-Soviet propaganda. The Italians didn't realize that it was equally effective anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi propaganda, but the Germans did and banned it.
Miss Rand may have implied quite strongly that taxes were somewhere near the evil category, but never implicitly said there should be NO taxes. She said taxes should not be confiscatory. She believed taxes should be voluntary and many government services should be pay as you go (the courts for example). Can you say Fair Tax?
I saw Tannenhaus interviewed when the book came out (C-Span I think) and he said that when he started the book, he was believed that Hiss was innocent. The evidence convinced him of the opposite.
I agree. It is a good read. Chambers was one hell of an intellect and a very brave man. He suffered much for telling the truth, but never complained. I think he saw it a penance for his actions as a young man.
Her novels amused me when I was a teenager (I stayed up all night reading "Atlas Shrugged" - well, there are worse things I could have been doing I suppose), but it was her essays that made her case. These are still respectable, particularly one from the 1960's where she predicted that the left, realizing that their programs could no longer be justified by referring to economic science, would move to environmentalism as a bulletproof excuse for power.
yep, the 60's essays that i spoke above still read well today, laying transparent the democrat party for what they are.
"She believed taxes should be voluntary and many government services should be pay as you go (the courts for example)."
Voluntary taxation? There's a pipe dream!
Sorry Ayn - I like my military strong, my cops competent and armed, and the potholes in my roads fixed in a timely fashion, all of which is impossible with 'voluntary taxation'.
But they are polemics, and of course should be read that way. Imagine a novel built from the speeches of W.J. Bryan.
Speeches in print - and boy, are there a lot of speeches.
My problem these days is that she was long-winded. When I had more energy for these things, that was less of an issue.
Well, I guess Chambers wasn't big on Rigoletto. But folks will be singing La donna e mobile many years after Chambers has vanished completely from human memory. Operatic caricature works.
As for Atlas Shrugged, it is a remarkable book. It is remarkable more for its Children of Darkness, the Wesley Mooches, than its Children of Light; but the Children of Darkness do need their foils. The book is remarkable for its insights. Written in 1957 (or so - I'm not looking at at copy) it talks about the debasement of the currency (no inflation in 1957 that I recall); it talks about socialized medicine (almost no one had any medical insurance in 1957, let alone government insurance); it talks about "equalization of opportunity" bills (no affirmative action in 1957); it talks about the proliferation of so many laws that everyone is in violation of one or another, so that the political class can pick on anyone they might choose. And it talks about a lot of other stuff too.
Chambers missed it all.
ML/NJ
Thanks, I'm working my way through a series of books that I wanted to read before I die (hopefully many, many years from now), and my daughter bought me "Atlas Shrugged" and an Aldous Huxley book "Point, Counterpoint" for Christmas.
I'm about a fifth of the way through "Atlas", and I find it to be harshly polemical, and somewhat of a caricature of the thirties gangster movies. The best analogy of it so far is "Dick Tracy" of recent memory, with Warren Beatty (of "Reds" fame, or infamy).
The philosophy promoted in the book seems, thus far, to be fairly superficial, dealing with life on a primal basis, incorporating few, if any, of the deeper things.
But, then, I am only part way through it, so, who knows? It may get better. As an avowed believer, however, I doubt that I'll any more appreciate her blatant atheism by the time I'm at the end of the book than I have at the beginning.
She may not have had many characters with children, but I don't see procreation as altruistic. If you're smart, you can learn so much more about the world by interacting with or just observing children that you can use to make other aspects of your life better.
I believe he even said so in some of his later writings.
Well, Chambers didn't have the benefit of hindsight. He was reviewing the thing in 1957 after all, and the bloody things really are an acquired taste as literature.
There is a reason prophets are not honored in their times.
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