MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Atlas Shrugged at Fifty
Part I: “Courage to Face a Lifetime”
The leaves trembled in the sun. They were the brilliant green of early spring; the green was not so much a color, but an emotion, evoking a spirit of freshness that matched the crisp, clear air of this April day. It looked as if the trees that lined the bike path had suddenly pushed up, full-grown, from the earth to greet the sunshine that signaled the end of a cold, desolate winter. The young man hoped he would never die. Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could feel the hope and promise of this day every day of his life. But he knew that he felt like this only because he had skipped class this afternoon and had decided instead to ride his bicycle down this path that meandered through campus, following the river that led to the high-rise buildings downtown. He was a very young man. He was 18 years old, in his second semester of college classes at a large Midwestern university – and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind, for he gave no thought to dying. He thought only that he wished he could find happiness and meaning in his life – but that virtually everywhere he turned, he found people telling him he shouldn't be so "selfish." He did not like the things taught to him in school. His social-studies teachers praised as heroes Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. because they helped the "common man," but condemned as "greedy capitalists" men such as Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller. One of his grade school teachers told his class "With the privilege of living on planet Earth comes the responsibility to care for it" and required each child to report whether their parents recycled their trash. When he told the teacher what his mother had told him – that they didn't recycle because it was too inconvenient to sort the trash – the teacher told him his parents were "selfish" and failed to fulfill their "social responsibilities." His college teachers were even worse. His philosophy professor was the token conservative in the department, who, unlike his colleagues, taught that there were moral absolutes – but that they consisted in following what he reverently called "the Judeo-Christian tradition." His history professor said that "America is a great nation because ordinary Americans are good," but she denigrated America's Founding Fathers as "dead white males" whose ideas were irrelevant and "reactionary." When her lectures reached the late-19th century -- the period his textbook called "the Gilded Age" because it was a time when some industrialists became fabulously wealthy -- she condemned those industrialists as "robber barons" and instead praised Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson for "breaking up the trusts." The young man liked one of his teachers in college -- the graduate student teaching assistant who taught his math class -- but changed his mind the day the T.A. cancelled class, in sympathy with the University's maintenance workers who were on strike. He had enrolled in his state's largest public university, considered one of the preeminent institutions of higher education in the nation. It had been his parents' dream that he attend that school -- his father, who had begun saving for his son's tuition even before he was born, frequently told him as he was growing up, "You can't get anywhere in this world without a college degree." After nearly two semesters, however, the young man suspected the place was one vast fraud. He remembered the "diversity education" he received at freshman orientation, where he was taught he was "racist" simply because he was white, "sexist" simply because he was male, "homophobic" simply because he was heterosexual, and "ageist" simply because he was young. One of his friends in his college dormitory was forced to remove a poster of a swimsuit model from the door to his room; their resident advisor told his friend that it violated the university's anti-"sexual harassment" code. He had always wanted to start his own business, as each of his parents had. He wasn't sure exactly what kind of business it would be, but he knew he wanted to accomplish something that would allow him to earn his own way in the world. He'd thought he would major in business, but he was reconsidering those plans after attending a symposium at his university's business school earlier that semester. The theme of the symposium was "Business as a Calling," and the speakers talked about the need for businesses to have something called a "social conscience." The dean of the business school proudly declared that the school's graduates are taught not to be "mere dollar-chasers" but to pursue "a life of service": "To go into business means to make a commitment to being a good citizen, someone who looks beyond his or her own interests and instead considers the well-being of his community." The young man didn't feel guilty about wanting to make money – he just could not understand why his professors thought he should. He saw a bright blue spot ahead, where the bike path veered sharply to the left to avoid running into the river. He stopped just before the path turned, near a clump of trees that lined the riverbank. Here, with the sun shimmering on the river against the backdrop of the downtown skyline, he sat at the foot of a tree and opened his backpack. He pulled out the book that he had begun reading over the weekend -- a book that he found almost impossible to put down. It was a book unlike any he'd ever read before, a novel whose heroes were business people. "The John Galt Line," the chapter title read. When he got to the scene involving Dagny Taggart's press conference he began to smile. "`Do you want us to quote all the things you said?'" a reporter asked. Dagny's response was splendid: "`I hope I may trust you to be sure and quote them. Would you oblige me by taking this down verbatim?' She paused to see their pencils ready, then dictated: `Miss Taggart says – quote – I expect to make a pile of money on the John Galt Line. I will have earned it. Close quote. Thank you so much.’" He laughed out loud. He wanted to cheer, to jump up with his arm extended, his fist clenched, and yell, "Yeah!" It was a reaction that many passages in the novel would provoke as he completed reading it over the next several days. He knew that reading this book would give him the courage to face a lifetime.
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Readers of Ayn Rand's novels, no doubt, will recognize the preceding story as a kind of parody of one of the most moving passages in The Fountainhead, the beginning of Part 4, which tells the story of the young man on a bicycle who meets Howard Roark on the crest of a hill, overlooking Roark's just-completed resort at Monadnock Valley. (See Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, 25th anniv. ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 527-30. My account of how "he did not like the things taught to him in school," although a fictionalized generalization, is based upon recent critiques of American education, including Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (New York: The Free Press, 1998). The story of the environmentalist grade-school teacher is adapted from Steven E. Landsburg, The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1993), Chapter 24, "Why I Am Not an Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology.") I parodize Rand here with a serious purpose: to illustrate the point that, just as Roark's architectural achievement gave the young man in Fountainhead "the courage to face a lifetime," Rand herself has given countless individuals – epitomized by my fictional young man – similar courage, through her remarkable novel Atlas Shrugged. First published fifty years ago, in October 1957, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a book that has changed the lives of millions of persons. The book is unique: it is both a mystery thriller and a new type of fictional work – a philosophical novel. It tells a compelling story, with an enthralling plot and boldly delineated characters. (As many commentators have observed, Rand writes in black and white rather than in shades of gray: her heroes portray human beings at their best; her villains are “rotters,” humans at their worst.) And, in telling its story, the novel also outlines a new philosophy, which Rand called Objectivism because of its fundamental emphasis on the existence of objective reality. That philosophy – which also emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism – is Rand’s solution to the greatest problem of modern times, which is (as discussed below) a moral crisis that afflicts all mankind. I know of no book other than the Bible – and certainly of no novel written in the modern era – that has had as great an impact on so many people's lives as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. (A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club ranked Atlas Shrugged as second only to The Bible as the book readers identified as having most influenced their lives.) It is not an exaggeration to say that it is certainly the most important book of the 20th century and quite possibly the most important single book ever written. (I happen to think, as I discuss more fully below, that Atlas Shrugged is far more important than the Bible, for the philosophy it presents is a philosophy for living in the modern world. It’s not just an alternative to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition but also an antidote to the poison that moral tradition has spread throughout Western thought and culture for the past 2,000 years.) It’s a book that all well-educated persons ought to read – and a book that no one who is truly an achiever can afford to ignore. Given my views about the significance of the novel, I am deeply honored and privileged to be a speaker at The Atlas Society’s celebration of the 50th anniversary in Washington, D.C. on October 6. The all-day conference at The Renaissance Hotel will feature talks by leading scholars, experts, and entrepreneurs (both Objectivist and non-Objectivist); they include prominent libertarian Charles Murray and journalist John Stossel, Objectivist scholars David Kelley and Will Thomas, philosopher Tibor Machan, entrepreneurs Ed Snider and Fred Smith, and Cato Institute president Ed Crane. A reception at Cato will feature comments by Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, Rand’s former associates and co-founders of the Objectivist movement. (See the conference schedule here.) I will participate in the second morning panel, where I will briefly comment on “Atlas and the American Revolution.” I will discuss one aspect of the importance of the novel – an aspect that is especially evident to me, as a historian: how Rand’s novel reveals both the incomplete nature of the American Revolution and what is needed to complete it. I will not steal my own thunder here, but rather I’ll comment generally about the importance of Rand’s novel to America and the world today. And, in Part II of this blog essay, I’ll discuss the book’s main theme and also identify some of my own personal favorite things about the novel. In her book Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto of the Mind (A Reader’s Companion), Mimi Gladstein describes the multi-faceted nature of Rand’s novel. It’s a mystery thriller, with an intricate plot involving an unknown “destroyer” who seems to be taking away the world’s ablest businessmen – the “men of the mind,” who run the “motor of the world.” It’s an Arthurian romance, with a company of heroes embarked on a noble quest. And it’s also a science fiction novel, with a setting that seems to be a projection into the future. (Although many elements of the book are dated to the 1950s – for example, the heavy reliance on railroads for transportation – the world Rand describes is not the world of 1957. The world outside the United States is made up of socialist “People’s States”; the U.S.A. is led not by a president but by Mr. Thompson, the “Head of State,” and a “National Legislature” displaces Congress. Moreover, notwithstanding much of the outdated technology featured in the book, it also contains some key futuristic inventions – a motor that runs on atmospheric static electricity, a process for extracting oil from shale rock, and Rearden’s Metal, “a metal that would be to steel what steel had been to iron” – that still do not exist 50 years after Rand wrote the novel.) Gladstein adds, “Perhaps more than a science fiction novel, Atlas Shrugged can be characterized as a combination dystopian and utopian novel. (It’s “dystopian” aspect unfolds as the plot shows a world in crisis, on the verge of total governmental and societal collapse. The utopian aspect is limited to the first two chapters of Part III and the closing scene of the book.) Gladstein also describes the novel as a “feminist fable,” of a sort. Although almost all the novel’s heroes are men, there is one woman who is the novel’s protagonist and heroine – Dagny Taggart, “the young woman who runs a railroad,” the Operating Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental. Gladstein notes, “Dagny is a heroine who is equal to any and superior to most of the male characters in the novel” and has been called by one commentator “arguably one of the strongest heroes in Western literature.” And Dagny is a principal in all three love affairs that comprise the novel’s romantic plot (and, of course, all the novel’s sex scenes). First and foremost, however, Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical novel. As literary scholar Kirsti Minsas has noted, Rand “used the simple formula of a detective story to create a highly complex philosophical novel – a novel where ideas are presented as answers to the mysterious events.” And what ideas! Rand was the most original thinker of modern times – someone who dared to question the accepted wisdom of nearly 2,000 years of Western thought. Nathaniel Branden has emphasized Rand’s innovative thought in his description of the book: “Encyclopedic in its philosophic and psychological range, the novel deals with the widest and most basic problems of human existence – and to those problems Rand brings an inexhaustible richness and originality of perception and analysis. There is no issue that she does not treat in a fresh and startlingly illuminating way. One of the slogans of the heroes of the novel is ‘Check your premises’ – and it is this that Rand demands of her readers: to check, to re-examine, to rethink the most fundamental premises at the root of their convictions and their culture.”
(Branden, “The Moral Revolution in Atlas Shrugged, Atlas Society reprint of 1962 essay, p. 38). What Rand conceived in Atlas Shrugged – presented throughout the novel but most explicitly, in the form of a mini-treatise, in a 60-page speech given by the novel’s mysterious hero, John Galt – is a complete and entirely new philosophical system, which she called Objectivism. Rand described the essence of Objectivism as “the concept 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.” In his insightful essay “The Revolutionary Philosophy of Ayn Rand,” in the new issue of The New Individualist, Robert Bidinotto (the award-winning editor of the magazine) sums up each of the key elements of Rand’s description of her philosophy, showing how the novel dramatizes them. (See Robert Bidinotto, “The Revolutionary Philosophy of Atlas Shrugged,” The New Individualist, October 2007, pp. 33-39.) Objectivism explains both what’s wrong with the modern world and what is needed to save it. The world of Atlas Shrugged is a world in crisis. America, its best (and last) hope, is in decline. As Edward Hudgins notes in his New Individualist essay, “Atlas Shrugged as Prophecy,” there are “beggars on the streets, closed stores, industrial and consumer products in short supply, and, ominously, competent and intelligent workers hard to find.” Conditions are far worse in the rest of the world, with most of the nations turned into socialist “People’s States.” Although still semi-capitalist, the United States suffers from its mixed economy (which, as Rand described it in her 1965 essay, “What Is Capitalism?” is a mixture “of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism”). The consequences of that mixed economy are that, in Hudgins’ words, “We see governments intervening to help some favored group or industry, often at the behest of politically connected businessmen bent on extracting unearned wealth from their competitors – a trend that causes further economic hardships. This disintegration accelerates throughout the story until, in the end, we see the collapse of industrialized America.” To be sure, Atlas Shrugged defends capitalism by showing how and why government regulations destroy the social order that emerges from free markets. But the crisis depicted in the novel isn’t just a socioeconomic or political crisis; it’s fundamentally a moral crisis. What is that crisis? Howard Roark, the hero of Rand’s earlier novel, The Fountainhead – which Rand herself called “an overture to Atlas Shrugged” – identified the basic problem in his courtroom speech, when he declared, “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” (The Fountainhead, 25th anniversary edition, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968, p. 717). The root cause is a moral code based on altruism, which Roark (and Rand) defined a “the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.” (p. 712). By challenging altruism – revealing the inherent evil of that doctrine and all its horrible consequences – Rand was presenting a moral defense of both individualism and capitalism. The moral defense of individualism and capitalism that is presented in Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s distinctive contribution to modern philosophy. Little wonder that the novel has inspired millions of individualists – not only Objectivists (persons who identify with the philosophy originated by Rand in Atlas), but libertarians and other free-thinkers of all intellectual stripes. Everyone who has read the novel and had their own life profoundly changed by it has their own story of inspiration. In the October issue of The New Individualist, editor Robert Bidinotto writes movingly about how “The Book” was responsible for his contemplation of “the tattered wreckage of [his] college career,” exactly forty years ago, this month. My own story isn’t quite as dramatic. I had read my first Rand work – her novella Anthem – for a utopian literature course that I took in high school. (Amazingly, it was a public high school in Michigan, where I had the good fortune of being taught by a remarkable woman who was not the typical English teacher at a government school. She encouraged me to read many of the “Great Books,” the classic works in philosophy, by directing my independent study.) I also had acquired a paperback copy of Rand’s nonfiction book The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays on ethics and other philosophical subjects, which I’d read by my freshman year of college. I didn’t return to Rand’s fictional works until after my freshman year, when I read The Fountainhead during the summer I spent interning in Washington, D.C. (the eventful “summer of Watergate,” in 1974, culminating in President Nixon’s resignation). When I ran across the line in Howard Roark’s courtroom speech – “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing” – I was struck by the profound truth in that statement. I’d always been an individualist and, hence, found the character of Roark – the architect of uncompromising integrity – to be the kind of hero I identified with. Reading The Fountainhead and seeing firsthand how dangerously big the U.S. government had grown (I was an intern in the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress and thus had an insider’s view of how much Congress was meddling in so many areas not within its constitutional authority), I left the nation’s capital as a libertarian – although I didn’t yet know what libertarianism was. Politically, I still identified myself as a Republican, although I was definitely more of a “Goldwater Republican” – that is to say, a limited-government, or libertarian, Republican, rather than a moderate Nixonian or a conservative Buckleyite. After I resumed college in the fall of 1974, I changed my majors: I ceased being a pre-med student, with a double major in chemistry and philosophy, and instead decided to major in history. (Among other things I discovered during my summer in Washington, D.C. was the importance of studying American history. I realized, after taking my first college history courses the fall semester of my sophomore year – a survey course in U.S. History and an advanced course in U.S. Intellectual History – that I could best study the kind of ideas that most interested me by taking mostly courses in history, plus a few philosophy and political science courses. It was in my history courses, especially those taught by political historian Shaw Livermore, Jr., that I became particularly interested in the thought of Thomas Jefferson and in the American Founding period.) I finally read Atlas Shrugged in my sophomore year of college, during my winter break in December-January 1974-75. After reading the novel, I wrote in my journal that I was glad I’d waited until after taking those two history courses plus a philosophy course in Ethics, which made me “better prepared to understand Atlas Shrugged.” I knew that reading the novel indeed would change my life. I also wrote, “I hope that it is a book far ahead of its time; that I live in a world where life is still possible . . . that I can be like Dagny Taggart or John Galt, but with no need to go on strike against the world.” I added that, “now, profoundly influenced by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and the goal I set to my life – to live” – I was ready to begin the second semester of my second year of college. I soon read all the other published writings by Rand – the rest of her fictional works, including her semi-autobiographical novel We the Living – and the nonfiction essays collected in such books as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness, The Romantic Manifesto, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and For the New Intellectual. And I subscribed to The Ayn Rand Letter – and regularly read Miss Rand’s commentary on current events until she ceased publishing the newsletter, several months later. I had become a self-taught student of Objectivism, and I continued to develop my own personal philosophy inspired by Rand’s Objectivism all the while I was pursuing my formal education, completing my undergraduate studies in history and my graduate studies in law and history. I didn’t begin to think of my political philosophy as “libertarian” until, in the early 1980s at the University of Virginia, I became involved in the libertarian movement by founding a libertarian student group at U.Va. (a group that, under a different name, still thrives at Mr. Jefferson’s University). And I didn’t meet any other Objectivists until I founded that group and discovered that most of its members, like me, had been introduced to libertarianism through Rand’s works, particularly Atlas Shrugged. (Rand herself denounced libertarians as “hippies of the Right,” and many of her “orthodox” followers still despise libertarians, despite Rand’s clearly important place in the history of classical liberal, or libertarian, thought.) Finally, in recent years, as I’ve pursued my career as a law professor, I finally became involved in the Objectivist movement – being a member (a Sponsor, in fact) and a regular faculty speaker at the summer seminars of The Atlas Society (formerly The Objectivist Center and the Institute for Objectivist Studies), the organization founded by philosopher David Kelley (a man whom I’m proud to call my friend). At TAS summer seminars, I’m always thrilled to meet other individualists who – like the fictional young man at the beginning of this essay – have found that Atlas Shrugged has given us “the courage to face a lifetime.” In Part II, to be posted next week, I’ll discuss more fully the basic theme of Atlas Shrugged and some of my “personal favorite” things about Rand’s novel.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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