An important chapter, number 14, entitled “The Sanction of the Victim.” In it are two set-piece speeches, Hank Rearden’s at his trial and Francisco’s five-page disquisition on Rand’s sexual theories. In between are the actual dramatic developments, and they’re 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 Rand’s 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 it’s contemptible.”
It is, to say the least, indiscreet to refer to one’s 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 weren’t before, some distinct lines drawn with respect to Hank’s 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. Lillian’s 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 he’d 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 didn’t you inform your friends about me?” he [Hank] asked.
The boy had answered brusquely, not looking at him, “Didn’t want to.”
“It could have made your career at the very top level. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it.”
“I knew it.”
“Then why didn’t you make use of it?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know.”
And on to the show trial, for that is what the hearing into Rearden’s and Danagger’s illegal business dealings really is. Here we have a necessary departure from reality in order to support Rearden’s expression of his current philosophical state, of which Rand, as a witness to the great Soviet show trials of the 30’s, 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 Rearden’s 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 court’s proceedings and hence its sentence. He’s 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 Rand’s case: that the ethical system under which looting is permissible requires the victim’s 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 Rand’s 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, that’s 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. Rearden’s 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, I’ll never think that it’s hopeless…I’ll never be tempted to quit. You’ve 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, what’s a moral premise?” “What you’re 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, wasn’t it?” “Are you sure of it?” “Sure, I’m 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 I’m not sure quite what to make of it. Perhaps at that point even Rand had had her fill of dialectic.
But this is Rand’s 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 – they’re pals now, at least for the balance of the chapter, and Rand uses this particular sounding board both to suggest very broadly what Francisco’s real game is and second to present, in his mouth, her theory on human sexuality. The latter isn’t anything we haven’t 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, doesn’t 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 one’s focus on the ideal mate. It’s 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 50’s, 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, Rand’s 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 Teresa’s character and achievements, for example, but that’s 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 Dagny’s 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 isn’t, 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 Superwoman’s list of finalists. And he can, in this system, desire no other. It doesn’t 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. He’ll 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 pal’s 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 Francisco’s collusion. Hank is furious, of course, but the reader is unmoved. He was warned, after all.
Have a great week, Publius!
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.
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.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDE2MTMxODE5Y2YzMGNlOWExZmJjYmJhYzViMDk0NjA=
“I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases. An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading. The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.” I admire the lawyers of the Counterterrorism Division, and I do not question their good faith. Nevertheless, it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States). Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues. I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president’s first obligation to protect the American people. Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop.”
Read the whole thing as this is an excerpt.
Fits rather well with last week’s topic, doesn’t it?