Posted on 04/18/2009 7:45:27 AM PDT by Publius
Thanks for all the hard work put into this thread.
As usual you’ve done a fine job.
Congressional hearings have 2 purposes.
1) To crucify and place blame on someone who may not bear partial responsibility, many times a flunky or even better to slant the facts to blame the opposition party.
2)To conceal the real truth.
Think back to the 9/11 hearings. Gorelic sat on the board of questioners when she should have been in the Dock.
Ayn Rand: The Right's Helen Thomas. I'm not sure an actual picture of Rand is the way to win people to the cause. (Course, half of Helen's putrid ugliness is her soul showing through, so it's not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison.)
You found Noumenon’s repost! Thanks! I wish he’d spend more time at FR. He is an orthodox Randite, and he could add a whole lot to these threads.
Hey, Noumenon! Do you ever hang around here anymore? We could use your input in this project.
Noumenon would be a very welcome addition to our discussion.
He’s someone who can explain Rand as well as Billthedrill. He hasn’t been around here for a while, unfortunately.
An important chapter, number 14, entitled The Sanction of the Victim. In it are two set-piece speeches, Hank Reardens at his trial and Franciscos five-page disquisition on Rands sexual theories. In between are the actual dramatic developments, and theyre really pretty interesting. But clearly Rand would rather lecture than entertain, which is one problem in a novel of ideas where occasionally the novel and the ideas diverge, at least for a time. One can almost feel Rands determined effort to reunite them in the ensuing chapters.
That said, I did enjoy the thing. It begins at a Thanksgiving dinner, at which celebratory occasion Hank experiences another of his continuing epiphanies about the nature of his family and acquaintances. Brother Philip chirps the customary progressive drivel about the evils of business:
Businessmen are taking advantage of the national emergency in order to make money. They break the regulations which protect the common welfare of all grow rich by defrauding the poor of their rightful share they pursue a ruthless, grasping, grabbing anti-social policy I think its contemptible.
It is, to say the least, indiscreet to refer to ones host in such a manner, especially when he is about to be put on trial for precisely those things. Hank calls him on it and Philip discovers very quickly that there are now, where there werent before, some distinct lines drawn with respect to Hanks toleration. Hank is changing, hardening before their eyes, becoming less malleable, less capable of the crude manipulation they have been practicing on him for what Lillian describes as the last 25 years. Along the way Hank throws off this rather interesting statement:
You concluded that I was the safest person in the world for you to spit on, precisely because I held you by the throat.
It is a behavior common to those who are manipulating other people through a scheme of contrived obligation and guilt. (It also describes the five-decade-long relationship of the European Left with their despised, ruthless, and yes, anti-social, protectors across the water). This behavior requires the sanction of the victim. Without that sanction it has no power. And Hank is slowly coming to the realization that it is a crime and a betrayal, an act of immorality, for the victim to grant that sanction.
Lillian, who one might expect to be the most aware of this change in Hank, seems the least so, and attempts to play on the guilt she believes that Hank feels for having an extramarital affair. It is one more case of lead-like density from a woman who has little else going for her but her ability to pull the strings on a puppet who seems busily occupied in cutting them. Lillians stock in trade is her ability to deliver her own husband to other people. But Hank simply does not feel the guilt for his affair that she is counting on. The reason for this will become clearer later in the chapter when Rand spins her theory of the nature of human sexuality.
It is an uncomfortable scene, broken when Hank decides hed be better off spending the balance of the last day before his trial at the factory. And lo and behold! in an otherwise empty factory there is the young fellow sent to spy on him, the one Hank refers to derisively as the Wet Nurse. He is in the midst of his own existential crisis, and we learn two things: first, that he is a metallurgist by training and second, that he has a conscience, a real one.
Why didnt you inform your friends about me? he [Hank] asked.
The boy had answered brusquely, not looking at him, Didnt want to.
It could have made your career at the very top level. Dont tell me you didnt know it.
I knew it.
Then why didnt you make use of it?
I didnt want to.
Why not?
Dont know.
And on to the show trial, for that is what the hearing into Reardens and Danaggers illegal business dealings really is. Here we have a necessary departure from reality in order to support Reardens expression of his current philosophical state, of which Rand, as a witness to the great Soviet show trials of the 30s, was certainly aware. For one thing a refusal to enter a plea would most likely have resulted in a plea of not guilty being entered for him (in an American court, anyway), for another, no judge charged with the mission this sort of trial entails would allow the victim to make a defiant, three-page declamation. It is not a real courtroom, of course, it is a stage, and it is not a real trial, it is a dialectic, and the reader will be more comfortable simply accepting that.
I shall not belabor the specifics of the arguments most have already been developed and are merely re-stated in Reardens words. (In fact, later he accuses Francisco of placing them in his head your stooge whereupon Francisco reminds him that they were, on the contrary, things Rearden had believed and acted on all his adult life). There is, however one additional development in the spirit of the chapter title, and that is that Rearden is refusing to grant sanction to the courts proceedings and hence its sentence. Hes no longer playing the game. And the alternative to that is a naked use of force:
If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary cooperation of your victims [who] will discover that it is their own volition which you cannot enforce that makes you possible Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun If you believe you have the right to force me use your guns openly. I will not help you do disguise the nature of your action.
And there is Rands case: that the ethical system under which looting is permissible requires the victims buy-in in order to masquerade as anything but naked coercion. In a cultural sense this is very powerful to refuse to grant the moral standing of those who feel that social justice entitles them to expropriate your property is to expose them for the bullies and thieves that they are, once they do so. In Rands world they hesitate; in ours they will do so enthusiastically, self-righteously, and in the spirit of class vengeance. Rearden is let off with a minor fine, suspended, which he suspected he would be from the beginning. His counterparts in the great Moscow trials were shot, as they knew they would be from the beginning.
That is the nature of a show trial, after all, not a masquerade for power but an open expression of it. A real show trial is a public display that one side is triumphant and the other both disgraced and helpless. That is the reason certain activists of the Left are so insistent on holding such trials for former members of the Bush administration if they can find a means to effect them. Justice has absolutely nothing to do with it and political theater, everything.
And the truth is that, pace Rand, the state and the people behind it will not be in the least reluctant to resort to naked coercion, they revel in it, in fact, thats the point of the exercise in the first place. Coercion is the nature of the state. Rand, a Russian expatriate, knew it better than most people of her time. Reardens triumph here he walks, of course will not and cannot be a final victory. He has refused to grant the sanction of the victim, and it leaves the state only with the resort to naked force. Is he naïve enough to think that the state will not use it? Perhaps he is, but Rand knows better, as we shall see.
Dagny misses the point.
Hank, Ill never think that its hopeless Ill never be tempted to quit. Youve proved that the right always works and always wins
Does it, now? There are, of course, motivations for quitting other than hopelessness. It will take both Dagny and Hank a long time to realize that but realize it they will. One who has realized it is Francisco, whose own motivations are becoming clearer both to Rearden and to the reader. But first we finish our post-trial visit with the Wet Nurse, who is undergoing a push toward clarity all his own.
The Wet Nurse asked him at the mills, Mr. Rearden, whats a moral premise? What youre going to have a lot of trouble with. The boy frowned, then shrugged and said, laughing, God, that was a wonderful show! What a beating you gave them, Mr. Rearden!... How do you know it was a beating? Well, it was, wasnt it? Are you sure of it? Sure, Im sure. The thing that makes you sure is a moral premise.
One very minor note for writers of dialogue I reproduced the form of the thing in the paragraph above; a rapid-fire exchange that eschews the normal paragraph-break-per-quote form found in the rest of the novel. It is a curious departure, and Im not sure quite what to make of it. Perhaps at that point even Rand had had her fill of dialectic.
But this is Rands moral premise: a notion that to do one thing is right and another in its place, wrong, and that the principle does not change as a function of who is doing the doing. Special rules for special people need not apply. That may seem strange for one whose imagery is so heavily Nietzschean, and is one reason that Rand is not really Nietzschean at all. The moral premise applies to everyone, stock boy to stockbroker, policeman to politician. Were it otherwise the looters would always be in the right. And so that is all that stands in the way of a consensual victimhood, in the way of an outright use of force: a moral premise. And the reason that Atlas must shrug is that the moral premise now is held in contempt and will not serve to protect the victim.
Hank seeks out Francisco theyre pals now, at least for the balance of the chapter, and Rand uses this particular sounding board both to suggest very broadly what Franciscos real game is and second to present, in his mouth, her theory on human sexuality. The latter isnt anything we havent figured out by now, but briefly it consists of the idea that sexual attraction is perfectly normal and is one manifestation of intellectual admiration; that to the virtuous the ultimate aphrodisiac is virtue. It is a completely logical extension of her idealized human condition and in my opinion it is false, or at best, incomplete. Francisco informs us at length, one unbroken stream of pop psychology running to 618 words (good Lord, doesnt the fellow ever pause for breath?) that to Rand the reason for imperfect coupling is an imperfect view of self, low self-esteem, and a lack of personal actualization. As those improve so, apparently, does ones focus on the ideal mate. Its a beautiful idea, one supposes, but not one held in much favor by anyone who has actually observed the maddening, contradictory, baffling complexities of human sexuality in action in the real world.
If the frequent visitation of this particular issue seems a bit too insistent to the modern reader we must remember that the 50s, although not quite as sexually repressed as certain contemporary commentators like to think, still were quite repressed in terms of public expression of matters sexual. Pregnant, for example, was not a word uttered on the public airwaves. At the time of writing, Rands philosophy of sexual liberation was just as radical as her philosophy of economic liberation. And presumably the same philosophical considerations that free a person from guilt over making money, free her or him from guilt over making love. Not, presumably, from the responsibility of making babies reliable chemical birth control was still in the future as of the writing of the novel (the FDA approved the first hormonal contraceptive in 1960) and one notices that the complication never arises within its sexually liberated main characters.
I would be the last to deny that admiration of the character and achievement of a partner act as a sexual attractant, but there is rather a bit more to it than that. I admire Mother Teresas character and achievements, for example, but thats as far as it goes. I swear.
Francisco is still carrying a torch for Dagny based on that premise, and so is Hank, her current partner in the making of the two-backed beast, and so, one suspects, is that mystery admirer who has haunted Dagnys surroundings from time to time. Three at least worthy admirers, and only one will be chosen. One sees Rand projecting herself into Dagny here after the manner of a medieval romance: the woman is the transcendent, the desired, the unattainable. It isnt, in my view, one of her more admirable moments. Love pure and chaste from afar is a nice turn of phrase but a feller can get awfully lonely occupying a permanent and hopeless second place on Superwomans list of finalists. And he can, in this system, desire no other. It doesnt strike me much as how people really behave and I thank God for it.
We leave the chapter with a triumphant Rearden determined to defy all the looters and sorely tempted to kick the moochers out of his house. Hell make as much metal as he likes and sell it to whomever he pleases and keep the country running despite the worst efforts of those who are trying to tear it down. Well, he intends to, anyway. His pals copper, on which he had based these hubristic plans, resides at the bottom of the ocean courtesy of one Ragnar Danneskjold and very obviously with Franciscos collusion. Hank is furious, of course, but the reader is unmoved. He was warned, after all.
Have a great week, Publius!
Also, tax law.
I agree. As anyone who has lived life can verify.
I am reminded of the incident in Rand's own life when she made a play for her close associate Nathanial Brandon, who was, I believe, married and considerably younger. He turned her down, basically because, for all her brilliance and intellect, she was just too old for him. He didn't find her sexually attractive!
Made her crazy and she banished him from her circle. And one of the reasons she said the banishment was necessary was because Brandon obviously was morally corrupt because he didn't find a superior woman like her a turn on.
Those of us who subscribed to the "Objectivist Newsletter" in the 1970's got a front row seat to the somewhat tawdry battle. It was not her finest moment.
Haven’t had much time for discussion of late. Most of my efforts have been going into making a living and training for the inevitable. For example, I shot a poor 160 on the AQT today. I am not in the best shape and it shows. When I can get it all to click, I’m making head shots at 250 yards from prone and standing positions, but sitting is a real problem. Aside from my eyes (bifocals), strength and flexibility, I’m just fine.
So wife and I are training and bringing our skills back to and beyond what they were. That’s the trouble with getting old, preoccupied and lazy, I guess.
I may not make the AQT tomorrow, but I’m back to a damn good start.
As for Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, hey - we’re living it. She and Orwell were just a generation or so off.
Which is why I started the book club. Not enough people have read the book because they were daunted by its size.
Forewarned is forearmed.
I still recommend and give away at least a dozen or copies of that book ever year. That’s gotten more expensive of late - I used to be able to buy a used paperback for $4-$5. Now it’s more like $8-$12.
I’m beat - going for a hot shower and bed...
Yeah, here in CA we have the unelected “Coastal Commission.”
I’ve snickered more than a few times when some poor liberal businessman has had a run in with those people. The CA Coastal Commission is slowly creating more and more Conservatives, due to their arrogance.
bump
As to the trial being out of today’s headlines, I think we’ve actually gone beyond this by now. The bankers who I would normally have put as the “victim” recently were actually well in cahoots with the government in terms of taking advantage of items such as the Community Reinvestment Act and securitization to make profits, but I wouldn’t call that productive. Same with the automakers. They have gone along with all the government regulations in order to make money in the short term, but I’d feel better about them if they didn’t take government money and made the cars that made them money, rather than those that allowed them to be in compliance of CAFE standards.
A Reardon-like action on the part of the car companies would be to push the high-profit vehicles like SUVs and Pickup Trucks (the cars that Americans REALLY want) and tell the government to shove it when they are forced to make the cars the government wants them to make. Go ahead and fine us if you must, but we’re going to build what the market says we must build.
On the banker side of things, it’s hard to see much difference between government and bankers these days since they move back and forth between private and public sectors so freely.
I know it’s much easier to draw a clear distinction in fiction, but I’m not seeing a lot of clear-cut distinction in real life these days. Maybe it’s because our companies have gotten so big that there are too many stockholders which have to be answered to on a quarterly basis, not allowing for a strong executive to behave like Reardon here. If I see a company run by someone like him, I’ll buy their products.
The wife works for JP Morgan so I get some behind the scenes glimpses. Jamie Dimon has had a few Reardonesque moments in the past few months.
There is no question that there were a number of bankers, automakers and wall streeters who acted more like Jim Taggert than like Hank Reardon, but there are good ones out there that are getting blame for the misdeeds of others. Of course, that is the goal of the current administration... isn't it?
I could have sworn that there was a scene where Francisco is talking to Hank and says that the progress of the world has depended on just a small handful of men. I’m wondering if I have the wrong characters or even the wrong book. Can anyone help me with this?
Men, on the other hand, respond primarily to visual stimulation. Just look at advertising if you need proof. Now deep, emotional affection and attraction that makes a marriage last over the decades can be founded on shared admiration of each others virtue and values, but the initial attraction in youth many times is a physical attraction. Plus a man who has an affair on his wife, frequently does so because of physical attraction, “the thrill of the hunt” or just because some men see no connection between sex and true love and affection. A woman who has an affair does so frequently because of an emotional attachment she has formed with the other man that does not exist between her and her husband.
It's hard wired into our brains, no matter how much we like or dislike it. Call it an evolutionary adaptation, or the way we were created. It serves the purpose of the continuation of the species.
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