Posted on 08/15/2009 7:44:28 AM PDT by Publius
Where does Rand leave us at the conclusion of this monumental work? Atlas has shrugged. The leadership of the revolution has filtered down from its progenitor, John Galt, through his closest circle of friends, through a class of achievers that encompasses the fields of science, engineering, construction, transportation, art and philosophy, to settle at last on the shoulders of the common citizen, who must bear the ultimate responsibility for choosing a life of mind or a life of “fake reality.” That choice is still very much up in the air as the novel ends. The country is in chaos as the result of the strike of the men and women of the mind, and the resolution is to be found only through the adoption of a new moral code based on objective truth and rational dealings between men and women.
Galt is so certain of his victory in the last scene that he announces the return of the strikers. The denouement of the novel took place at the beginning of winter and the coda in the spring, but which spring? We cannot tell.
It’s time then for a broader perspective on Atlas Shrugged. The structure of the novel is straightforward. There are three sections of ten chapters each. The arc of the plot ascends through a desperate effort of the industrialists to reignite the country’s production, countered by moves on the part of the established powers in academia, bureaucracy and culture, descending in the final third of the book to the ravaging of the country and the escape of its creative elements. Let us recapitulate both Rand’s narrative and the philosophy that it is intended to illuminate.
Part I: Non-Contradiction
The first third of the novel contains an introduction to characters, both protagonists and villains, and a description of the dynamic that exists between industrialist and bureaucrat, between objective philosopher and nihilist pretender. The world it describes is very much a creation of the latter in each case. We learn this from set-piece speeches at formal parties, from radio broadcasts and the other manifestations of popular culture, and from the mouths of the principals Rand casts as villains.
This section introduces us to our heroes, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, and elaborates on their struggle to construct a railway that will support the last, best hope of the country with respect to industrial progress, resisted with an inexplicable stubbornness by those who, it would seem, would be its principal beneficiaries. It ends in triumph. Finding one another’s arms and handing the Colorado industrialists their lifeline, Hank and Dagny obtain a victory that is known to be hollow even as it is accomplished. The section ends with the dissolution of the Colorado industrialists and the last, defiant, fiery gesture of Wyatt’s Torch.
Within this section Rand defines the philosophical case of the looters. Economic inequities, which are the result of achievement, are, in fact, the result of theft. Profit is immoral, extra value squeezed out of the consumer of goods and services beyond the latter’s “natural” cost. This profit exists to feed the demands of greed and arrogance, and it is the rightful role of the State to control the greedy and arrogant in the interest of the collective. It is society – the collective – that has the ultimate claim on the fruits of the individual’s labor, a claim it makes in the name of all. This culture is maintained by its promoters’ control of the bureaucracy, academia, journalism and popular culture, through which a steady stream of propaganda beats the citizen into acceptance.
Within this is the notion that individuals who are achievers compose a class of their own, whose interests, motivated by greed, are inimical to the collective. Within this premise is the genesis of another class in opposition, a ruling class whose task it is to rectify the theoretical theft by means of a real theft, and to redistribute the wealth to its source, the collective, taking a generous cut off the top for itself.
This is the case of the looters. Their methods are law. They are secure in the knowledge that their enemies are law-abiding. They flatter themselves that they are equal in virtue to the producers as all are merely thieves. They feel superior to the producers as they are the more successful thieves. In a world where all economic activity is theft, success in thievery is the logical summit of society and the rightful task of those who sit there.
We learn in this section that Rand regards human sexuality to be as much an expression of the mind as a steel bridge or a railroad track, the rightful property of the creative that has been suppressed and misrepresented in an effort to exercise power over them. In this sense, economic liberation is sexual liberation as well. Here Dagny becomes not simply Rand’s protagonist, but her surrogate, and to a remarkable degree their own sexual lives run in parallel.
Part II: Either-Or
In the second section we are shown the philosophy of the looters in action as it methodically takes the country into its grip.
Dagny and Hank discover that, just as in Colorado, the entire country is beginning to crumble under the rapacious onslaught of the ever-hungry looters. In addition, the producers who could be counted on to feed the parasites for the good of all are beginning to disappear. The host is weakening, and the parasites are growing apprehensive. They will do what they can to maintain the system, even at the cost of eliminating some of their fellow parasites and by inviting the hosts to share in their power – by feeding upon themselves.
But there is organized resistance to the conspiracy of looting. It is underground and its perpetrators are damned as agents of greed. Yet it is the parasites, the looters, who truly are the greedy ones. They will not stop until they control all production so that they may redistribute its fruits in places other than the pockets of those who actually earned them. That turns out to be their own pockets, the reward of cleverness and the righteousness of promoting social justice.
The philosophies of both looter and producer are based on self-interest, but that does not make them equivalent, nor is actual theft the equivalent of accused theft. One critical difference is that the thief must have the producer, but the converse is not true. The producer must create or there will be nothing to steal – he must live for the sake of the thief. For the code of theft that is this twisted social contract to function, he actually owes this to the thief on behalf of the collective of which they both are a part. That social contract requires the victim’s sanction. It will have no difficulty in procuring the sanction of the thief.
We understand in this section that someone, The Destroyer, is acting to break this social contract by withdrawing not only the sanction of the victim but the physical presence of the victim. The section ends when the principals are about to meet The Destroyer.
Part III: A is A
In this section we learn at last Rand’s conception of an ideal social contract, first by observing the activities of its proponents in a mini-Utopia named “Galt’s Gulch”, and later through an exhaustive rhetorical presentation. The main dramatic conflict arrives when the principals, Dagny and Hank, must run to completion the course that has caused the rest of the creative class to go on strike. The agonizing conclusion requires the abnegation of all that has kept them producing under the existing system. It is clear at last that it is the creators and producers who are the exploited and the ones who claim the exploited status, their oppressors. The things that have been earned – material wealth, family, social status, and most vital of all, the opportunity to create – must be rejected for the strike to have any chance of success.
In the end, they are. Dagny is admitted into the company of the strikers as the alpha female to Galt’s alpha male. The rest accept comfortably subordinate positions. It is not, in the end, an egalitarian society even though predicated sternly on equal rights. It is a hierarchy built on relative technical excellence and moral virtue, and its citizens compete fiercely for primacy within their chosen fields.
This, then, is the case of Rand’s heroes, and the foundation of a new philosophical approach to morality she termed Objectivism. We have examined its particulars in some detail, but briefly the idea is that human existence is based on reason and the recognition of the part of reason in the dealings of men and women with one another. The repository of both rights and responsibilities is within the individual, and no valid moral code may be based on one individual’s right to demand that another live for his or her benefit. There are no group rights; indeed, class identification is essentially a curiosity, and social mobility is unhindered by it, driven only by individual merit.
As we have seen, these are ideas developed during the philosophical period labeled the Enlightenment, and Rand is only to be considered a conservative in that she wishes to base her new utopia upon these old ideas.
As John Galt traces the sign of the dollar in the air, we leave the novel with the knowledge that a new world is to be built upon laissez-faire capitalism and human rights, based on reason and focused on the individual. Rand’s case is that it is the only system ever to have developed a surplus that offers the luxury of being second-guessed, scorned and looted. For her that is its greatest testament.
Rand’s Sources
We have stated that Rand has attempted to reconstruct the body of modern Western philosophy from first principles, which is mainly, but not entirely, the case. She had a formal philosophical education in Russia before emigrating to the United States, and not only acknowledges, but pays open tribute, to Aristotle as her principal intellectual model.
Here we see the divergence between Rand’s philosophy and the tremendous body of fictional narrative that is Atlas Shrugged, for her narrative runs very much along the lines of another philosopher, Nietzsche, with his insistence that human excellence creates a defense against nihilism and that the superior man or woman has, within certain limits, the right to make his or her own rules. This dynamic between philosophy and narrative, between reason and passion, between Aristotle and Nietzsche, runs the entire length of the novel, and in the end it is up to the reader to resolve it – or not. It is that demand which takes the novel out of the category of popular fiction and into the realm of serious intellectual consideration.
Rand’s Style
Ayn Rand was the adult identity of the Russian girl named Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, for whom English was not a native language. It is a testament to her linguistic abilities that she mastered English to the point at which she could support herself as a professional screenwriter and playwright in the depths of the Great Depression. This was a signal accomplishment, and by the time she began writing Atlas Shrugged she already had one best-selling novel, The Fountainhead, to her credit. For this reason we must search for another source for those odd quirks that catch the modern reader’s eye, such as the use of the formal “one” for the vernacular “you” in the mouths of her least educated characters, a fondness for the more formal “perish” in place of the more common “die”, and a correct, but somewhat strained, insistence on “you’ll” in the place of “you” in informal conversation. Further, that even her least educated and most despicable villains tend to present their ideas in the form of logical propositions that would not be out of place at an Oxford formal dinner.
These are not fatal flaws; they are scarcely to be considered flaws at all, but stamps of the author’s fiercely analytical approach to human intercourse. That analytical approach is not always happily applied, especially when it comes to the description of the vagaries of human sexual relations. Here the conflict between narrative and philosophy is most sharply defined – we rejoice that Dagny and Galt have found one another but are dismayed at the strange rationalizations that attempt to bring their joyful and vigorous sexual attraction within the realm of analytical reason. Rand’s narrative describes the lovers with convincing verisimilitude; her philosophy struggles to account for them. If, in the end, we suspect that there is something more than reason going on here, we have Rand the story-teller to thank and leave Rand the philosopher to be furious about it.
The Faults of Atlas Shrugged
It’s too long, for one thing. Each of the protagonists has his turn before the podium, but because they are of an identical philosophical stance, their various expressions of it tend to blend into one another. In fiction there is no need to hear the same idea expressed in many different ways in the mouths of sundry proponents. In philosophy, or more accurately in the teaching of philosophy, there is.
Lest we lose sight of Rand’s objective here, it is not simply to give the reader a rousing adventure ride, but to teach. If the same philosophical or moral point takes various shapes, it is the teacher’s hope that the student will apprehend one of them. For a novelist this is wasteful; for a didact it is indispensible.
There is, of course, the matter of The Speech. As a literary construction it is disastrous, an enormous, immobile rock of idea placed in the middle of a stream of plot. It is, despite Rand’s best effort to make it accessible, dense, complicated and challenging. It does not advance the plot, but it is the reason for the plot’s existence.
The Speech is the finish of the novel of ideas; the ensuing three chapters compose the resolution of the narrative. It is a unique and somewhat clumsy construction, but it does appear to serve its purpose.
Like many novelists, Rand has been accused of being cruel to her minor characters. We have seen the Wet Nurse mocked nearly up to his last breath, Cherryl Taggart hounded over a precipice and into a watery grave, and most poignant of all, the abandonment of the loyal, able and virtuous Eddie Willers along a deserted track in the Arizona desert. The elite protagonists bask in their perfection and seem to shade their eyes against the glare of a glorious future while standing on a mountain of bones of those who did not live to make the journey. One understands that such a monumental project will have its victims; one waits in vain for the heroes of the piece to acknowledge them.
Atlas Shrugged’s Place in Modern Literature
Flawed as it is, Atlas Shrugged succeeds brilliantly as a novel of ideas. It has an acknowledged appeal to young people in that it presents a clean, workable system of ideals on which to base a moral approach to the world. Its coherence, its certitude, and its outrageous political incorrectness appeal to the rebel in young and old. In it the complications of parenthood do not arise; the difficulties in accommodating ideals that in practical application, eventually conflict, are nowhere to be found. It is not necessarily a young person’s novel, but it is an idealist’s novel.
If Atlas Shrugged’s critics tend to accentuate its flaws and ignore its message, they do so at the risk of echoing the absurdities of Rand’s villains: the collectivist, the nihilist, the person whose education and reputation exceed his or her actual intelligence. Most timeless about Atlas Shrugged are the culture and character of its villains. Five decades after its publication, their voices still sound in the mouths of its detractors and of public servants who solemnly repeat the platitudes without considering their sources. They need to check their premises.
15 August 2009
For its time Atlas Shrugged was a unique admixture of philosophy and politics, and it is difficult to begin an understanding of Rand’s great work of synthesis by going straight to the original sources. Fortunately there is a more graduated approach available, for many of the same issues and influences that crystallized in Atlas Shrugged were the topic of one of the great philosophical popularizers of the late 20th century, Mortimer Adler. Through a lengthy career he touched on nearly all of the constituents of Rand’s magnum opus.
By Adler and recommended in the area of philosophy:
Economics:
Political science:
And toward religion, a personal favorite:
For the reader already acquainted with the ideas illuminated by Adler:
These can also form a foundation for the consideration of Rand’s primary sources:
This isn’t a laundry list – each of these has a direct hook into the immense intellectual currents that swirl underneath the surface of Atlas Shrugged. It would be an easy task to triple its length; far more difficult to cut it.
The only problem is that they set the bar so high, I'm not sure anyone would be brave enough to try to follow.
Thanks. I will look for that one.
Thanks for all the work.
It’s been great following your lead and building off both of your observations and insightful commentary.
I look forward to the next book club discussion.
Well, we started this one in January, maybe another idea would be to take a few months off and start something new the first of next year. I certainly don’t mean to speak for them. If they’re ready to go I certainly am, but I don’t want for us to treat them like Rand’s producers get treated. ;-)
Maybe I read this? I don't know. I just know I was never impressed by Kant. Leonard Peikoff slams him in his Ominous Parallels to which Rand wrote an introduction and which I highly recommend.
ML/NJ
Nicely put. I'm with you on the "let them get their strength back first" approach.
Pub and BtD... we are ready when you are.
As I said earlier, I'm leaning toward an interleaved approach to the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers in chronological order so as to follow the thrust and parry of the debate over the Constitution. I'm also looking at reformatting the papers into Structured English with the intent of making them more accessable to the modern reader.
However, any FReeper can start a FReeper Book Club dedicated to reading a book. There are only three rules:
Pretty simple.
You are too modest. We know that what you guys did was anything but "simple".
Once the blitz starts, keep us posted of the progress. And tell your agent that you have at least one "pre-sold" copy already signed up.
Since this IS the anniversary year of the Moon Landing and Woodstock, I would also recommend reading Apollo and Dionysus in The New Left: the Anti-industrial Ideal.
Let us not forget the skeleton in Ayn Rand’s closet: St. Thomas Aquinas.
And for all of her raving against Plato, the purism she sought out in her own ideology marks her as a peculiarly Platonic anti-Platonist. Just MHO.
What a great story. Thanks for sharing.
Of coarse! They have done such a fantastic job it was meant as a compliment to them.
Without your help this book would have been just another door stop. Could not have made it without you.
Let me add my heartfelt thanks to both of you for your dedication and hard work these past months. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading, thinking about and contrasting AS with contemporary America, once again. I still remain astonished at how prescient Ms. Rand was.
Good luck with your publishing effort — I’ll certainly add your book to my collection!
On a related note, I noted on this thread several months ago that I had spotted a “Who is John Galt” billboard in Georgia. I was asked where it was, and was not able to specifically ID it’s location on I-95.
Well, I saw it again yesterday. It is located on the Southbound side of I-95 about one mile north of Exit 1 in Georgia.
Southbound FReepers might be on the lookout for it. It is a very visible and attractive billboard, I might add.
At 18 I'd have never picked up a philosophy book without it being a requirement for a class. Instead I picked up a novel and it shaped the rest of my life.
Thanks for the reading list..
Thanks for your wonderful contribution too.
I got derailed from Saturday participation due to a croaked computer, a major illness and then a flood but I always went back and read every line of commentary as time allowed.
Publius,
I’d also like thank you and BilltheDrill, as well as everyone else on the list who has made my re-reading of Atlas Shrugged much more enjoyable and illuminating than it was the first time through. I enjoyed the background information, the expansion of many of the points beyond what I would have gotten on my own, and the general high level of discourse on the subject. I only made a few comments, primarily because I invariably found whatever point I might have had already made by the time I checked in to the thread. I look forward to the next book!
- Ted
Good reading suggestions too.
Everyone, be sure and check the gutenberg.org website for etexts (or audiobooks) of the older works in the public domain. Most of them are there and for folks trying to hang on (as I am at least) you can save some cash.
Thanks for all of your hard work! I came to the party late, but it has been a pleasure to revisit this ‘old friend.’
“The arc of the plot ascends through a desperate effort of the industrialists to reignite the country’s production, countered by moves on the part of the established powers in academia, bureaucracy and culture, descending in the final third of the book to the ravaging of the country and the escape of its creative elements.”
Anyone with a working mind, looking at the state America is in today should either cry in despair or be mad as hell and be ready to fight!
I choose the latter. :)
Wow. I wish I was involved earlier. I waited for each Saturday’s thread, knowing I would read insights I hadn’t suspected and that I would have to think carefully to be able to offer anything that would add to the conversation.
Thank you Publius and Billthedrill. This was enlightening and fun.
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