Atlas Shrugged Review - Part I

I quit.

My bookmark rests at page 893 (out of 1168) in my decade-old copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - and there it will stay. I refuse to waste another moment of my life being subjected to this redundantly pedantic, delusionally angry phantasmagoria of imagined liberal wickedness and/or cataclysmic indolence. It's a shame, because the storytelling is pretty damned compelling when she is actually moving the plot forward rather than pontificating interminably on mundanely simplistic moral lessons. I would like to share my thoughts, in an effort to purge the anger this massive tome has aroused within me. Also, perhaps I can save you the trouble of putting yourself through an exercise in futile open-mindedness.

I consider myself an amateur philosophy enthusiast, so I had hoped that delving into Rand's masterwork might provide me with some understanding of the movement that has most recently taken her as its paragon. After all, I can strongly disagree with most of Kant's conclusions while respecting the process by which he reached those conclusions, the extensive justifications he provides for them, and the rationality with which he lays them out. I, for example, believe it would be highly moral to lie to the would-be murderer regarding the whereabouts of his intended victim, but I admire Kant's steadfast commitment to his own categorical imperative - and I am even open to the possibility that I am wrong and he is right. (See: On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives.)

After suffering through 893 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I have reached the conclusion that it is profoundly generous to call Rand a philosopher. A philosopher must put forth a set of heuristic, practicable principles that are justified by an articulated process of logical thought. Rand partially fulfills the first part of that obligation by saying that she conceives of "man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Well, that all sounds well and good, but her evidence, in the form of a long-ass novel, is sorely insufficient. Philosophy abhors easy platitudes. It demands a more comprehensive and erudite approach to the great questions. It's easy to say "Never lie." It's another matter altogether to exhaustively justify that statement beyond the superficial instances in which it seems obviously correct. Kant did that. Rand does not apply such standards to her own dearly held principles.

What Rand does, in Atlas Shrugged, is actually a pretty fancy little trick. She sets up a sort of modified double straw man argument. (I say modified because only one is intended to be torn down, but the other is every bit as fictional.) Her heroes and heroines are delightful apotheoses of the species. Nary an objectionable thought or word is thought or uttered by Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, John Galt or Fransisco d'Anconia (once we understand his motives for seemingly offensive acts), nor by any of the small supporting cast of hagiographed industrialists. They are shining examples of rugged, deeply-principled individualists, bringing all of their extraordinary talents to bear in their chosen fields, generally for the betterment of mankind.

And then there's everybody else. Rand imagines a universe that is populated almost exclusively by grotesque caricatures of the most reprehensible sorts of people she can imagine. These are the alleged enemies of Objectivism. Not one of them is recognizable as a real human being - not that Rand ever bothers to fill in the broad, deprecating strokes of disgust with which she draws them. The philosopher, writer, and musician are portrayed thusly:

"But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?" asked an earnest matron whose husband owned an automobile factory.
"None," said Dr. Pritchett. "None withing the range of man's capacity."
A young man asked hesitantly, "But if we haven't any good concepts, how do we know that the ones we've got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?"
"There aren't any standards."
This silenced his audience.
"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any."
An attractive young woman, whose father owned a coal mine, asked indignantly, "Who can tell us that?"
"I am trying to," said Dr. Pritchett. For the last three years, he had been head of the Department of Philosophy at the Patrick Henry University.
...
"It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult," said Dr. Pritchett. "Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more...tractable."
He shrugged and reached for another canapé. A businessman said uneasily, "What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."
"Oh, that?" said Dr. Pritchett. "But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."
"But, look...isn't that sort of a contradiction?"
"Not in the higher philosophical sense." You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid."
"But it stands to reason that if--"
"Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age."
"But I don't quite understand how we can--"
"You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction."
"A contradiction of what" asked the matron.
"Of itself."
"How...how's that?"
"My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained."
"Yes, of course...only..."
"The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man."
"But when we prove it," asked the young woman, "what's going to be left?"
"Instinct, said Dr. Pritchett reverently."
At the other end of the room, a group was listening to Balph Eubank. He sat upright on the edge of an armchair, in order to counteract the appearance of his face and figure, which had a tendency to spread if relaxed."
"The literature of the past," said Balph Eubank, "was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being -- all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for the first time, by exposing the real essence of life."
A very young girl in a white evening gown asked timidly, "What is the real essence of life, My Eubank?"
"Suffering," said Balph Eubank. "Defeat and suffering."
"But...why? People are happy...sometimes...aren't they?"
"That is a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial."
The girl blushed. A wealthy woman who had inherited an oil refinery, asked guiltily, "What should we do to raise people's literary taste, Mr. Eubank?"
"That is a great social problem," said Balph Eubank. He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. "Personally, I believe that an Equalization of Opportunity Bill applying to literature would be the solution."
"Oh, do you approve of that Bill for industry? I'm not sure I know what to think of it."
"Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," said the woman apologetically.
"But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?" asked Mort Liddy. "That's a new one on me."
"My name is Balph," said Eubank angrily. "And it's a new one on you because it's my own idea."
"Okay, okay, I'm not quarreling, am I? I'm just asking." Mort Liddy smiled. He spent most of his time smiling nervously. He was a composer who wrote old-fashioned scores for motion pictures, and modern symphonies for sparse audiences.
"It would work very simply," said Balph Eubank. There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books."
"You've got something there," said Mort Liddy. "But wouldn't it be kinda tough on the writers' bank accounts?"
"So much the better. Only those whose motive is not money-making should be allowed to write."
"But, Mr. Eubank," asked the young girl in the white dress, "what if more than ten thousand people want to buy a certain book?"
"Ten thousand readers is enough for any book."
"That's not what I mean. I mean, what if they want it?"
"That is irrelevant."
"But if a book has a good story which--"
"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature," said Balph Eubank contemptuously.
Dr. Pritchett, on his way across the room to the bar, stopped to say, "Quite so. Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy."
"Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music," said Mort Liddy.

Don't get me wrong - this is a marvelously written and hilarious little literary burlesque. I just don't think it says much for Rand's so-called philosophy if these are the best devil's advocates she can produce to test the strength of her ideas. If there's not a soul on earth that would sympathize with these waxwork characters, what purpose do they serve in advancing or supporting Objectivism?

Wesley Mouch, the lobbyist-turned-almighty bureaucrat who exacerbates humanity's downfall through the enactment of the sort of absurd policies that Rand imagines liberals would enact, such as the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, comes in for similar treatment:

Wesley Mouch had a long, square face and a flat-topped skull, made more so by a brush haircut. His lower lip was a petulant bulb and the pale, brownish pupils of his eyes looked like the yolks of eggs smeared under the not fully translucent whites. His facial muscles moved abruptly, and the movement vanished, having conveyed no expression. No one had ever seen him smile.
Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family's diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

These, believe it or not, are brief examples of Rand's cartoonish vilification of non-Objectivists. There is one particularly ridiculous, 18-page scene in which a cabal of powerful "looters," led by Wesley Mouch, conspire to enact Directive Number 10-289, which essentially ceases all private enterprise and innovation, seizes all intellectual property, freezes all wages and prices, and otherwise turns all power over to the Unification Board, which is comprised of these same men. 18 pages! In a delirious ten-page screed against Marxism, a former employee of the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation describes the company's descent into madness and dissolution when the owners attempt to turn the company into a collectivist enterprise.

The loathing with which she writes about these men - the constant repetition of their evocatively slimy names, the sarcasm, the disgust even at the physical features she has endowed them with - undermines her objective. These empty suits say nothing positive about Objectivism. They demonstrate only that Rand is as petulant as Wesley Mouch's lower lip.

Perhaps most deplorable is the two-page description of a train catastrophe (brought on, of course, by the forces of anti-Objectivism) in which Rand parades the train's non-Objectivist occupants to their deaths with no small amount of smug satisfaction:

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a profess of of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men.
...
The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.
...
The man in Seat 5, Car No. 7, was a worker who believed that he had "a right" to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.
...
The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, "I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children."
...
These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

And so on. This is Ayn Rand's view of humanity. This is the lens through which she viewed her fellow inhabitants of the planet.

To be continued...

[Read Part II HERE]