MayerBlog: The Web Log of
|
|
|
Atlas Shrugged at Fifty
Part III: Celebrating the Book’s Significance
In this third and final installment of a series of essays celebrating Ayn Rand’s magnificent novel, Atlas Shrugged, on the 50th anniversary of its publication, I’ll report on The Atlas Society’s October 6, 2007 conference and publish the text of my talk at the conference.
The October 6th Celebration
I recently returned from Washington, D.C., where I participated in The Atlas Society’s conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged – an all-day conference held (appropriately enough) at the Renaissance Hotel, on Saturday, October 6, 2007. C-SPAN taped the conference and will broadcast it on C-SPAN2’s Book TV on Saturday, October 13, beginning at 12 noon. And Robert Bidinotto, editor of The New Individualist, has posted on his website, the Bidinotto Blog, a nice summary of the conference – with photos, too. It was a splendid conference, with a diverse group of experts who discussed various aspects of Rand’s magnum opus and its significance. Here’s my summary, including brief, parenthetical comments on each session’s talks, followed by the text of my presentation, “Atlas and the American Revolution.”
Ed Hudgins, executive director of The Atlas Society, welcomed everyone to the conference. (About 300 people registered for the conference – many more than the organizers had anticipated; the hotel’s Renaissance Ballroom, where most sessions took place, was packed.) Ed commented on the other big story in the news 50 years ago – the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik – and held up several copies of Atlas Shrugged published in various foreign languages (including Spanish, Russian, and Japanese), emphasizing how the novel has been read literally around the world. Panel One was chaired by Nigel Ashford, senior program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies. Writer Anne Heller (author of a forthcoming new biography of Ayn Rand) spoke about “Atlas and Rand’s Life.” (She told various stories relevant to the novel, including Rand’s experiences with train travel and the probable origins of the John Galt character.) Mimi Gladstein (chair of the Department of Theater, Film and Literature at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of four books, including The Ayn Rand Companion and Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto of the Mind), spoke about “Atlas and Rand the Writer.” (She discussed various ways in which Rand’s familiarity with films influenced her writing – including the “establishing shot” of Dagny Taggart in the first chapter of the novel.) Philosopher David Kelley (founder and senior fellow of The Atlas Society) spoke about “Atlas and Academia.” (He discussed how Rand’s novels have joined the canon of 20th-century American literature and how Rand’s ideas have become the subject of a “critical mass” of specialized work in academic philosophy; he also mentioned the growing attention to Rand’s work in other disciplines, particularly economics and business ethics.) I presented my talk, “Atlas and the American Revolution,” at the next session, Panel Two, chaired by Doug Rasmussen, professor of philosophy at St. John’s University and co-editor of The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984). Fellow philosopher Tibor Machan (professor emeritus at the Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, and the R.C. Hoiles Chair in Free Enterprise and Business Ethics at Chapman University, as well as the author of over 30 books) spoke about “Atlas and Ethics.” (He emphasized Rand’s revolutionary moral philosophy, aptly expressed by the subtitle of her book The Virtue of Selfishness: “A new concept of egoism.” And he delivered one of the most memorable lines at the conference, explaining his personal reaction to reading Atlas Shrugged when he was a young man – arguably a universal reaction, which explains why Atlas has been so popular, especially with younger readers: “Despite what my parents and teachers had told me, I realized I really wasn’t a total shit!”) Will Thomas (director of programs at The Atlas Society and author of Radical for Capitalism, among other works that he has authored or edited) spoke about “Atlas and Loving Life.” (He discussed the various ways in which Rand’s life-affirming philosophy suffuses the novel.) The luncheon speaker was Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of several books (including Losing Ground (1984), In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (1988), The Bell Curve (1994), What It Means To Be a Libertarian (1997), and Human Accomplishment (2003)). He spoke about “Atlas and Achievement,” discussing Rand’s valuation of human accomplishment itself, not just the goods or services being produced, and the “transcendental” values of achievement. Panel Three was chaired by Robert Bidinotto, the prize-winning editor of The New Individualist, the magazine of The Atlas Society. Edward Younkins (professor of economics at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, editor of a forthcoming book on Atlas Shrugged and author of numerous articles in accounting, business, and free-market journals) spoke about “Atlas and Economics.” (He spoke about how Rand’s novel is “a masterpiece of economics,” a literary treatment of free-market economic treatments that is unparalleled in the literature.) Ed Snider (president of Comcast Spectacor, a Philadelphia-based sports and entertainment company, and a trustee of The Atlas Society) spoke about “Atlas and the Entrepreneur.” (He reminisced about his friendship with Ayn Rand, as well as his role in co-founding the Ayn Rand Institute.) Rob Bradley (president of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston and a nationally-recognized advocate for free-market energy policy) spoke about “Atlas and Business Ethics.” (Noting how much of the field of business ethics today is nothing more than thinly-veiled business-bashing, he discussed how Rand’s ideas about the virtue of productive work might enlighten the field.) Panel Four was chaired by John Fund, political journalist and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Fred Smith (founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute) spoke about “Atlas and Politics.” (He discussed how the novel reveals the unlikely mix of business and politics behind the modern “mixed economy,” including how businesspeople are often their own worst enemies. He also delivered a memorable line, succinctly explaining the dangerous growth of government over the past half-century: “Every new enlargement of the state is justified by the problems created by past enlargements.”) Ed Crane (founder and president of the Cato Institute) spoke about “Atlas and the Fight for Freedom.” (In addition to crediting Rand’s novel for really changing the world – and particularly for helping create today’s influential free-market think tanks like the Reason Foundation, Cato, and CEI – he also discussed the sometimes-uneasy relationship between Objectivists and libertarians, as well as the similarity in ideas between today’s “left” and “right.” Crane, too, uttered a memorable line, referring to a comment in the previous speaker’s talk: “When Fred Smith compared Washington, D.C. to a whorehouse, he’s being unfair to whorehouses – which, after all, are voluntary.”) And Ed Hudgins (executive director of The Atlas Society) spoke about “Atlas and the Future of Objectivism.” (Discussing various areas of opportunities for Objectivists to have impact in today’s public policy debates, he concluded with the observation that it’s time for Objectivists to “put the schism behind us.”) During the late-afternoon reception at the Cato Institute, the highlight was the joint public appearance by Ayn Rand’s former associates, Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden (each of whom had been associated with Rand for nearly twenty years and who helped co-found the Objectivist movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s). The Brandens each reminisced about Rand’s writing of Atlas Shrugged and the impact that the book’s publication had on Rand herself and others in her circle. (Barbara Branden in particular made some poignant comments about how Rand, sadly, “suffered for her genius,” with her depression after the publication of Atlas. Echoing an observation she made in her book The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), she noted that Rand was never again as happy as she had been before the novel’s publication.) The gala banquet concluding the conference featured a keynote address by John Stossel, ABC News correspondent, co-anchor of 20/20 and author of The John Stossel Specials, and the preeminent libertarian journalist today (also the only libertarian regularly appearing on “Big Media” TV news). Stossel spoke about “Atlas and America Today” (adding some brief comments about Rand’s novel not only influenced his own appreciation for capitalism but also has helped millions of other Americans realize the value of free markets and the folly of government regulations). Also featured at the gala banquet was a special treat, a last-minute addition to the program: a panel discussion of the plans for the upcoming Atlas Shrugged movie, which is to be produced by Lionsgate studios and to star Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart. Chaired by John Aglialoro (Atlas Society trustee who purchased the film rights for Atlas Shrugged many years ago), the panel consisted of producers Howard and Karen Baldwin (the team that produced the Oscar-winning film Ray), director Vadim Perelman (who directed the film House of Sand and Fog), and Michael Burns, vice president of Lionsgate. Perelman, who (like Rand) was born in the former Soviet Union (Perelman emigrated from the Ukraine to the USA at the age of 14), is currently working on revisions of the script (the screenplay by noted Hollywood writer Randall Wallace); he assured the conference participants that the film will be faithful to the essential themes of the novel – although, of course, a two- or two-and-a-half hour film adaptation cannot be literally faithful to a nearly 1200-page book. And Burns, a longtime admirer of Rand, assured the audience that his studio has made a major commitment to producing Atlas Shrugged as a quality motion picture. David Kelley concluded the conference with apt remarks, recalling one of the many memorable scenes in Atlas Shrugged. In “Atlantis,” the first chapter of Part III of the novel, during Dagny Taggart’s visit to “Galt’s Gulch,” she is having dinner at the house of Midas Milligan with some of the key strikers, men she had known or admired for years, “men whose standards of value and honor were the same as her own,” Rand wrote: “[Dr.] Akston smiled. `What does this look like to you, Miss Taggart?’ He pointed around the room.
“`This?’ She smiled suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. `This looks like . . . like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.
“`Well, 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 how and on this earth.’
“`I know,’ she whispered.
“`And if you met those great men in heaven,’ asked Ken Danagger, `what would you say to them?’
“`Just . . . just “hello,” I guess.’
“`That’s not all,’ said Danagger. `There’s something you’d want to hear from them. . . . Miss Taggart, you’d want them to look at you and to say, `Well done.’ She dropped her head and nodded silently, head down, not to let him see the sudden spurt of tears to her eyes. `All right, then: Well done, Dagny – well done – too well – and now it’s time for you to rest from that burden which none of us should ever have had to carry.”
(Atlas Shrugged, pp. 735-36). Then David offered the toast, which was joined by all the conference participants as we rose to our feet – a toast to the author of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand – “Well done.”
And here’s the text of my presentation at the conference:
Atlas and the American Revolution
It was in honor of another 50th anniversary celebration – the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution, in 1826 – that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in his last public letter: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” It is noteworthy that Jefferson qualified his pronouncement: “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” Notwithstanding his characteristic optimism, Jefferson shared with his fellow Americans of the founding generation a realization that the Revolution they began in 1776 was still incomplete a half-century later. During his presidency and retirement years, he continued to believe that America had a mission to prove to the world “the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.” Indeed, as author of the Declaration of Independence, he was perhaps even more aware of how imperfectly the ideals of that founding document had been realized in American legal and political institutions. And he certainly was aware of the need for future constitutional change – of the need for laws and institutions to advance “with the progress of the human mind.” Ayn Rand was also aware that the American Revolution had been incomplete, and I believe this awareness was part of her purpose for writing Atlas Shrugged. As she stated in her essay “For the New Intellectual,” just a few years after the novel’s publication: "The world crisis of today is a moral crisis--and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution."
What was that political achievement? America's Founders established – for the first time in the history of the world – a society whose government was founded on recognition of the inherent, natural, and inalienable rights of the individual. They established written constitutions, founded on "the consent of the governed," and containing various institutional checks on the power of government designed to prevent it from being abused – for the Founders understood that, paradoxically, it was government – which was created to protect, or "secure," individual rights that poses the greatest danger to them. The reason is the unique nature of political power: that government, alone of all institutions in society, may legitimately use force to achieve its ends. A good society, the Founders believed, would have few laws – laws that were clear and respected by the people. Accordingly, they sought to create a "new science of politics" that not only checked the power of government, through constitutions, but also minimized the role of government to a few, essential and legitimate functions. However, the Founders' revolution in the philosophy of government was incomplete, as the dramatic growth in the size and pervasiveness of governmental power (at all levels, and particularly the national government) in the 20th century so vividly has illustrated. The American Revolution was incomplete – and the Founders' carefully devised constitutions failed – because the Founders' generation had no consensus about where exactly to draw the line between individual liberty and the coercive power of law, especially in the realm of economics. They failed, in short, to have a coherent theory of individual rights. This failure can be explained by two "gaps" in American thought, one in ethics and the other in politics. First, the political revolution was not accompanied by a revolution in moral philosophy. Many of the Founders adhered to traditional Judeo-Christian ethics based on altruism. Others, as "free-thinking" students of the Scottish Enlightenment – men like Jefferson – instead naively believed that humans had an instinctive "moral sense" that vaguely inculcated one's moral "duties" to others. Under either the traditional or the "enlightened" ethics, it was regarded as "immoral" for an individual to pursue his own self-interest, even if he did so in such a way as not to interfere with the equal freedom of others to do the same. To be "moral," it was assumed, one must sacrifice one's self-interest to the "needs" of others. Such a moral philosophy – rooted in older visions of a homogeneous communitarian society – was hardly compatible with the reality of American capitalism: the free, robust society of energetic, enterprising individuals, mutually profiting from each others' pursuit of their own rational self-interests--for example, the society described in the early 1830s by Alexis de Toqueville in his book Democracy in America. The second gap was in politics. In early American political thought, coexistent with the dominant radical Whig, or libertarian, political tradition – with its emphasis on individual rights – there was an older, competing tradition. This tradition, which scholars have called the "civic republican" tradition, traceable back to ancient Rome, preached civic "virtue" as consisting in the subordination of self-interest to the "public interest," or "common good." This notion, which was central to 16th- and 17th- century paternalistic theories of government, unfortunately persisted in American political thought and in American law. One consequence was a hostile attitude toward commerce and commercial activities that long has been part of American culture but which, too, was incompatible with a capitalist, "free enterprise" economy. This mixed ideology in American political thought of the Founding period made possible the so-called "mixed economy" of the 20th century. The rise of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century, during the several decades following the end of the Civil War, was accompanied by a growth in government regulation of business, at both the state and federal levels, under expansive definitions of the states' "police power" and Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. Responding to American public opinion – which was profoundly distrustful, indeed paranoid, about "big" business – as well as political pressure from various special interest groups, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and created regulatory agencies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, allegedly to "protect" competition. The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions beginning in the 1870s, sanctioned this expanded role of government by applying the old, 17th-century concept of "public interest" – particularly, "business affected with a public interest" – to undercut the constitutional safeguards given property and economic liberty through the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Antitrust law, together with the law of "unfair" trade practices, subjected American businessmen in the 20th century to vague legal standards, under which entrepreneurs may be penalized for being too good as competitors. A notorious example from the turn of the last century involved the man who probably was the real-life model for Nathaniel Taggart: James J. Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railroad Company, the only major transcontinental line built entirely by private capital, without federal land grants or other government subsidies. When Hill created the Northern Securities Company, a holding company combining his and his partners' railroads into a larger company in order to avert a takeover attempt by the Harriman interests who controlled the Union Pacific, the Company was immediately targeted by President Teddy Roosevelt's "trust-busting" campaign. The Justice Department brought suit under the Sherman Act, and the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 opinion in 1904, found the Company in violation of the Act as a "restraint of trade," even though the creation of the Company in fact had enhanced competition. Thus has antitrust law been used to penalize, for their ability, men of magnificent productive achievement: whether James J. Hill at the beginning of the 20th century, or men such as Bill Gates, at the end of the 20th century. Ayn Rand was a good student of American business history. The world she portrayed in Atlas Shrugged, of course, exaggerated this fatal flaw in the law--but only slightly. As she said in her 1964 lecture "Is Atlas Shrugging?" "the principles of every edict and every directive presented in Atlas Shrugged--such as `The Equalization of Opportunity Bill' or `Directive 10-289'--can be found, and in cruder forms, in our antitrust laws." To be sure, Atlas Shrugged portrays America in decline, as the inevitable consequence of its “mixed economy.” But the significance of the novel goes far beyond its critique of the modern regulatory/welfare state. Rand herself noted that the story of Atlas Shrugged "demonstrates that the basic conflict of our age is not merely political or economic, but moral and philosophical," the conflict between "two opposite schools of philosophy, or two opposite attitudes toward life": what she called the "reason-individualism-capitalism axis" and the "mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis." That conflict is at the heart of the basic contradictions in American law and constitutionalism to which I have alluded. To resolve the conflict, and to place the Founders' "new science of politics" upon a firm philosophical footing – and thus to complete the work of the American Revolution – we need not only to reaffirm the Founders' commitment to individual rights but also to ground that commitment in a coherent theory of rights. Constitutional protections of life, liberty, and property have been proven insufficient to guard individuals from the tyranny of the so-called "common good" or the "public interest"; we must realize, as clearly and as fully as Rand did, that there is no such thing, that it is an undefined and an indefinable concept, and that this "tribal notion" indeed, as she argued, "has served as the moral justification of most social systems--and of all tyrannies--in history." By presenting a new code of ethics--the morality of rational self-interest--Rand's novel provides what the Founders failed to grasp, the missing element of the American Revolution: the moral justification of capitalism, and with it, of the rights of all persons--including the American businessman. Perhaps we’ll know that the battle can be won, if we are able to add to the United States Constitution – if not as the next, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, then perhaps as the Twenty-Ninth or the Thirtieth – the amendment suggested by Judge Narragansett, in the final pages of Atlas Shrugged: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.”
| Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
|