Posted on 06/06/2009 7:23:17 AM PDT by Publius
We’ve seen Rand’s ideal Objectivist society operating in Galt’s Gulch. How well would it work in the real world?
I have always found the Gulch as one of the problems in the book. It suffers from the same (although opposite structure) sort of utopian vision that we make fun of when it comes from the left. If everyone plays their role it all works perfect.
The inevitable honest disagreements would arise and the competitive nature of the people in the Gulch make it hard to believe that any of them would happily go out of business when a stronger competitor moves in.
So, to your question. I don't believe that it would work any better than a socialist utopia.
20th Century Motors was that other utopia and Rand showed it running itself to ruin because it was founded on the wrong principle... from ability to need. Galt's Gulch is founded on the right principle of reward for effort but it leaves out the problems that would come when the scale expands beyond this core group of exceptional people. Fully half of the people in the world are below average. Mix them into a pure world like the Gulch and things become much more difficult.
The trick is to keep the core principles while devising appropriate rules of the game.
<“But she is astonished that Mulligan is charging John twenty-five cents to rent his car; she quickly learns that the word “give” is banned in the valley.’
That’s why I can’t stand this philosophy/book. The atheism! You’re politically incorrect if you “give” someone a ride.>
I’m afraid I don’t see what this has to do with not believing in a god. She is making the point that transfers of goods or services among free and independent individuals must be in the form of trades, either by barter, or through an intermediary such as a medium of exchange, in this case, gold. This can also, of course, involve a charitable emotion for one of the parties. Without that trade, and a coerced charity is not trade, the exchange can in effect only take place as a result of force.
Only if you have no right to your property can a coerced, uncompensated charity exist. I’ve often thought that the worst distortion of our moral education begins when we are admonished to share our toys in kindergarten, thereby teaching us that we have no property rights.
Kirk
” a former professor of economics who taught that one can’t produce more than one consumes”
Didn’t you mean “consume more than one produces”?
Sorry to pick a nit, and best of luck on your project.
I am fascinated each week by both of your contributions.
BTW, the CliffNotes on AS is surprisingly sympathetic. I’m reading that each week as well as this forum.
Kirk
“I made some extra banana bread today. I had a lot of bad bananas. I’m giving it away. I’m not charging anybody.”
But it makes you feel good, as well as getting rid of some unneeded bananas. And it is voluntary. And it doesn’t reward looting. THAT is the difference.
Kirk
To return to Heinlein's science fiction, prospectors on asteroids had no hesitation in giving air to someone in an emergency situation. However, once things were stabilized, it was customary to pay for the consumption of that air.
It has nothing to do with atheism.
And yet capitalism, based on the twin fuels of greed and envy, works just fine. Those twin fuels are two of the seven deadly sins, so human emotion and frailty are a part of what makes it work.
Thank you for catching that. Better to catch it now before a publisher does. FReepers rock!
To put it in a vernacular phrase, Galt’s Gulch always struck me as a situation of ‘too many Chiefs, not enough Indians’.
These are all world-class alpha dogs, and there are always disagreements about getting your own way in such a group.
Agreed. I think the answer is the return to a meritocracy.
Scrap affirmative action, return self-esteem to the realm of achievement rather than the current feelings-based "everyone is a winner" system. Yes, we should stress - even celebrate - good sportsmanship, but not at the expense of the winners.
Eddie Willers would have also been at home in Galt's Gulch. Not because he was a giant in his field, but because he understood how the game should be played. He applauded - without resentment - the winners.
Two sections down of three, and now we commence the final one, “A is A,” which title, as we have seen, is Aristotle’s identity axiom, one of three borrowed from his Metaphysics. This, the first chapter in the final section, is entitled “Atlantis” inasmuch as its activities take place in a remote, semi-mythical Colorado valley in which Dagny has crashed. Francisco had told Dagny that her road would lead her to Atlantis, and he meant it literally, but he did not mean as a result of an air pursuit. She is there, she is welcome, but because she has not reached it by virtue of intellectual and moral conviction she is profoundly an outsider, a “scab.”
Parallels to the versions of Paradise described by various religions are, in my opinion, quite deliberate, and were Rand not quite so deadly serious about the thing one might almost say satirical. Dagny has a near-death experience and wakes up in a perfect world, in the arms of a perfect man, in the company only of good people, the bad ones being banished. Heaven, of course. Or Valhalla.
Not to belabor the point, John Galt turns out to have some remarkably Christ-like characteristics, being, after all, the man “without pain or fear or guilt,” stepping completely formed from the unknown as Akston (who, we are told, is Galt’s “father” who did not conceive him) describes it later, like Minerva from Zeus’s head, which is as near as Rand could get to virgin birth without being named in a plagiarism lawsuit by the ghost of Saint Matthew.
Nor are we spared a description of his physical perfection that might have been culled from a Danielle Steele novel:
The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous; his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal.
That is a single sentence. Dear God.
When we finally get to dialogue it’s actually quite good, every sentence holding a double meaning, an allusion to what came before.
“Don’t move, Miss Taggart. You’re hurt.”
“You know me?” Her voice was impersonal and hard.
“I’ve known you for many years.”
“Have I known you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“What is your name?”
“John Galt.”
She looked at him, not moving.
“Why are you frightened?” he asked.
“Because I believe it.”
And through the chapter we actually discover that so long as we can keep from drowning in Rand’s schoolgirl gushing he is rather a likable fellow after all. All right, well, just one more:
…Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers…
We’re not quite two pages into the chapter. Hank Somebodyorother has become a distant memory. Hasn’t he? One touch of Randian weirdness:
…but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind…
Stop the pain, please. No, it isn’t, although that grotesque metaphor does explain a good deal about Dagny’s love life… one more, I can’t help myself:
…The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair – the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper…
OK, I’ll stop now. We get the point. Galt’s an android.
On a granite column at the entrance to Atlantis is a three-foot dollar sign made of solid gold, Francisco’s gently mocking tribute to its foundation. It is the logo on the cigarettes and their package, the totem of a world that is formed around moral propositions that are the opposite of those of the looters. In the year 1982 there was another huge dollar sign, a floral arrangement twice that size that was laid on the grave of Ayn Rand. In what is likely an accidental irony, she and her beloved Frank O’Connor are buried in Valhalla, NY.
The valley itself is protected by the illusion of a nearby mountaintop projected overhead that was, as Galt puts it:
“…calculated against everything – except a courage such as yours… you hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors…”
Courage or more likely suicidal stupidity, actually, but Galt is too polite (or smitten) to make the point. Midas Mulligan, however, is not, and delivers a bluntly outspoken rebuke to Dagny’s recklessness when he suddenly appears, the true owner of the valley. Galt? “He just works here.”
It is, incidentally, one of the few dated moments in this 50-year-old novel, this “ray screen” business that kills “magnetic,” by which one hopes Rand means “reciprocating” engines. In this Atlantis philosophers are also competent engineers and fry cooks; in the real world sometimes they only think they are. (One is struck by the similarity of Akston behind a short-order grill and his successors chanting the tragic mantra of the liberal arts major, “You want fries with that?”) Later there will be similarly dated allusions to technologies that our contemporary perspective may make us a little too ready to mock, as well as to ones we cannot mock because they have become reality.
At last Dagny makes the connection the reader made some chapters ago – Galt is the inventor of the miracle motor, and a similar generator powers the valley. Quentin Daniels is delighted – giddy, even – to be Galt’s understudy, and we learn that a number of the valley’s inhabitants are the happy subordinates to geniuses in their field. Others have excelled in fields quite outside their nominal areas of expertise in the “other” world – Hammond, the master mechanic, runs a grocery store, Dwight Sanders (who constructed Dagny’s wrecked aircraft) is a pig farmer, Judge Narragansett, who ruled in Mulligan’s favor in the long-forgotten disposition of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, raises dairy cows and chickens. Rand’s case is that those characteristics which allow an individual to excel in complex industrial or intellectual fields lend themselves well to agriculture and low-level infrastructure maintenance (Dick McNamara turns up as a lineman), but that the reverse is not true. It is the case of an idealist. Sometimes – perhaps more often than not, but not always – it’s true.
Oilman Ellis Wyatt is there, having solved the problem of the extraction of oil from shale. (That’s what I meant by that caution against snickering at Rand’s “rays.”) He has hired Dagny’s brakeman, the young fellow who whistled Richard Halley’s (also a valley inhabitant) Fifth Concerto lo those many months ago. Owen Kellogg is a resident. And yes, so is Francisco d’Anconia.
Wyatt tosses off a sentence that has since become an Objectivist aphorism: “…there’s no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.” Like many of Rand’s asseverations it’s true to a point, but not always. I once met a distinguished Japanese gentleman who was in the business of high-tolerance machining, who had spent World War II in the very building we were in at the time, an old torpedo factory. His job had been to smack test fuzes with a hammer to ensure they didn’t go off prematurely. That, my friends, was a lousy job.
Galt provides an insouciant contrast to Dagny’s occasionally overdramatic personality:
[Galt] “How did you happen to be following me?”
“I landed at the Afton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you.”
“I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn’t think of you. I thought you were coming by train.” “How do you want me to understand that?”
“What?”
“The one and only time when you didn’t think of me.”
He held her glance. “Any way you wish,” he answered.
She asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy’s accusation, “You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?”
“Yes.”
“You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me – knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?”
“Sure.”
A nice choice of rejoinder, I think. One almost sees his shrug and her fury. And later:
As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, “You’ve mapped this route deliberately, haven’t you? You’re showing me all the men whom – “ she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead – “whom I have lost?”
“I’m showing all the men whom I have taken away from you,” he answered firmly.
Speaking only of first impressions and only for myself, I should say that Rand, and Dagny, worship Galt for his perfection and that I like him despite it. That is apparently the minority opinion. We meet for a moment a nameless, beautiful young woman who is fishing for a living. She is, tellingly, a novelist.
Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in the glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.
Hank who? Francisco who? Well, here we see their fate, and the upshot of Rand’s flawed conception of human sexuality: it is “hopelessness, serenely accepted.” In no other aspect of human life would Rand permit this sort of inert fatalism.
So is this valley – Galt calls it “Mulligan’s Valley” – really heaven? Mulligan invites all of Dagny’s old friends to dinner at his place to honor her arrival. Let Dagny speak for herself:
She laughed suddenly… “This looks like…you know, I had never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word…now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that someday, in heaven, you will see those great departed…from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet…”
“And that’s one clue to the nature of our secret,” said Akston. “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now on this earth.”
And there we have it. It is a highly significant statement, the reason that Rand may rightfully claim her philosophy to be life-affirming. There are difficulties, of course – I should give a good deal for an afternoon drinking with the likes of Franklin, Washington, Montaigne, Alcibiades, Edmund Burke, Oda Nobunaga. That is quite outside the confines of the here and now - that is the point of Paradise, after all, to transcend the here and now. But it is heaven on this earth that is Rand’s aim, a heaven she clearly feels is within the capacities of men, a heaven denied by the profound moral error that is the credo of the parasites, the looters, the moochers, that has so twisted and warped its host society that no remedy less than the latter’s dissolution will suffice. Atlas shrugging is that dissolution.
“Given up?” said Hugh Akston. “Check your premises, Miss Taggart. None of us has given up. It is the world that has... All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work – and that which is its source – as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost.”
Each of the men at dinner – and they are all men, for Dagny moves in a world of men, and it is revealing that of the women she has met in the valley so far her only real reaction is a fleeting moment of jealousy – each of these gives a brief disquisition on the reasons for his going on strike, for at last we realize courtesy of a three-page paragraph from Galt’s mouth that they are, in fact, on strike. Last of all,
She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”
He chuckled. “My refusal to be born with any original sin…That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it, and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”
“…What did you do when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?” she asked.
“I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch out for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind – to watch their course…and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough.”
A lonely life, that of the outcast. How many of them are there, even now, in today’s America?
“Our sole relief were the rare occasions when we could see one another. We found that we liked to meet – in order to be reminded that human beings still existed. So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in this valley – to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements… Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense – for one month of life out of twelve. It made the other eleven easier to bear.”
It does explain the persistent references to one month’s vacation at a mystery location. And that’s all it was in the beginning, when the valley was a resort in the precise meaning of the word. It is now a nearly self-sufficient community courtesy of the industrialists who made their last stand in Colorado and now need somewhere to hide, literally, for they face imprisonment for the crime of striking – “deserting,” as Dr. Ferris put it. And who, we are to remember, wished to have them shot for it.
“We started with no time limit in view,” said Galt. “We did not know whether we’d live to see the liberation of the world or whether we’d have to leave our battle and our secret to the next generations… But now we think that we will see, and soon, the day of our victory and our return.”
“…when men see that neither their hearts nor their muscles can save them, but the mind they damned is not there to answer their screams for help… when they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food, and no way to obtain it – when they collapse and the road is clear – then we’ll come back to rebuild the world.”
Well, that’s the plan, anyway. Like most utopian schemes it is far more specific on how the present is to be broken down than it is on how the future is going to be built. The former is by far the easier of the two, as many a socialist revolutionary has found to his eventual dismay. But at least here we have the possibility inasmuch as these men and women already have built something in their lives. Che Guevara never did anything but destroy.
The dinner ends, and Dagny is escorted back to her host’s house for the evening. The guest room is a curious one – it is the place where each of the strikers spent his or her first night after severing ties with the outside world. It is a place of sleepless pain, of renunciation, with the graffiti on the walls to prove it. And – mirabile dictu! - the two of them do not wind up in Galt’s bedroom after all, although she contemplates his door and he contemplates her body. Sexual self-denial, in Rand? Yes, of course – sex is the consummation of intellectual convergence and Dagny is still not ready to put out on that level. It isn’t a case of a monastic renunciation of the world and the flesh, it turns out to be a choice between the one or the other. Saint Francis would have laughed to tears, and like his, Dagny’s plea is “but not yet.” Oh, and the valley?
“I call it Mulligan’s Valley,” he said. “The others call it Galt’s Gulch.”
Have a great week, Publius!
I argue with a lib friend on a regular basis. We came to the role of government to be like football. The rules committee is the legislature, the referees are the executive branch and instant replay is judicial. I pointed out to him that, unlike what government is doing these days, the rules set the boundaries within which the game is played but are not devised to favor one team over another. The referees are on the field, but are not players.
We found about 30 parallels... I will spare you a recitation. Bottom line, you comparison to sport is right on.
We’ve seen Rand’s ideal Objectivist society operating in Galt’s Gulch. How well would it work in the real world?
This wouldn't work for the same reason Communism doesn't work. And for the same reason that there will never be "Peace on Earth". 99% of people may go along with the premise, but there will always be one person, one dictator, one crazy SOB that doesn't want to follow the rules.
In the case of Galt's Gulch, if you don't follow the rules, you essentially get left on the side of the road to starve. That is a good thing, I think.
Another problem is that these people are all 3-sigma on the bell-curve. What happens when you get the WHOLE bell-curve? I'm a fairly bright girl (I like to think), but I don't think I'd be able to just instinctively know how to fish (the novelist on the dock) or how to run a cafeteria, or how to even make the perfect burger. I make a decent burger.....but because I only make ok-ish food, does that make me a slacker? Every darned thing that these people do, they do well. That strikes me as JUST a bit ludicrous. Usually people have their one or two gifts. Every once in a while, you come across someone that seems to be able to do everything, but they are rare.
Rand seems to imply that ANYTHING you do should be done to perfection.
Everyone seems to find Galt pleasant. He makes my teeth hurt. He's way to sanctimonious for my taste. This is where I get annoyed with Dagny, as well. Hello? Paging Hank Rearden? Hank Rearden to the courtesy phone......
I'm a way bigger Hank Rearden fan.
Oh, congrats on the potential book deal. You and Bill are deserving of hero-worship. I promise to buy it when it gets published! (publiushed?)
Excellent and congratulations.
Billthedrill somewhat agrees on John Galt. His contirbution this week is hilarious and right on the money.
If we sell the book, I'll jump up and down then.
That's terrific! I wish you both success in this endeavor. Looking forward to the publication.
I'm going to remind you of that statement in two weeks when we dissect Project X.
Interesting comparison: government to football. The rules would be the constitution. And if liberals ran football, the rules would be a “living, breathing document” to be interpreted any which way you choose...by instant replay? You can immediately see the fallacy of trying to operate this way....
hh
Many thanks to all for the encouragement both public and private. Long way to go yet, long way. For those who haven't figured it out yet, we are working ahead, and having just spent two solid weeks hammering on Galt's speech I'm beat. Pub' feels the same way.
I don't think, frankly, that I possess quite the human perfection to be invited to Galt's Gulch, and I'm not sure I'd be very happy there if I were. But if I were, and if I were, I'm not sure I'd want to leave. Rand's characters seem champing at the bit to return to the world that has taken everything they had, and only those for whom that sort of construction presents their source of self-actualization are likely to react that way. They are driven to create because they're creators, or something like that, but it is a little bit circular, like saying that I'm driven to drink beer because I'm a beer-drinker. There may be something to that, however, because suddenly it sounds like an awfully good idea... ;-)
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