Book review: Atlas Shrugged
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Atlas Shrugged is either destined to have a place in future sets of The Great Books of the Western World…or it is the most pretentious politico-economic-manifesto-thinly-disguised-as-a-novel ever written. The best way I can think of to describe it is in a good news/bad news format.
The good news is that Ayn Rand passionately hated statism in all of its forms (socialism, communism, fascism), and just as passionately loved America’s political liberty and economic free-market capitalism. The bad news is that she considered all religion to be mere irrational superstition, and worshipped at the twin altars of naturalism and human reason.
The good news is that some passages in the book set forth brilliant analyses of the futility of the pseudo-morality of “social justice” and “the public good” that nearly always produces injustice in the form of political tyranny and economic poverty. The bad news is that many of these analyses are embedded on boorish speeches by the characters that are supposed to pass as dialogue (nobody in the real world speaks in such long-winded soliloquies, because everybody around them would fall asleep), and crop up as predictably and often as songs in a bad musical. (Example: The renegade radio broadcast from John Galt to the American public is over 50 pages long, and is referred to later as having taken 3 hours to deliver. I believe it!)
The good news is that the book crafts a compelling description of the nation’s descent into anarchy at the hands of slimy, self-absorbed bureaucrats who worship money and power, and hide behind the facade of concern for the common man and use his natural compassion and sense of responsibility to enslave him. The bad news is that the novel is filled with dopey scenes of aggressive, greedy sexual immorality by the principal characters. (I’m sure this was daring and avant garde and shocking in the 1950s when the novel was published.)
Lest this review emulate the the marathon-like nature of the novel itself, I’ll give a brief summary of the story line. The quizzical question, “Who is John Galt?”, is found on the lips of many characters as an expression of the meaninglessness and mystery of life (cf. “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes). It turns out that John Galt is not just a mythical character. He actually exists, and he has been recruiting the world’s movers and shakers - industrialists, bankers, scientists, etc. – to disappear without explanation in order to let the world devolve into chaos and squalor without their leadership. This is because the world failed to appreciate them, disrespected them, and even punished their “greed” with confiscatory taxes and stifling regulation. Galt called it “mind on strike,” and it was intended to “stop the motor of the world.” (This is reminiscent of the thrice-repeated phrase in Romans 1 in describing God’s wrath on the Greco-Roman empire: “He gave them over…”) Galt realized that the only way to defeat the parasitical “looters” (the statists, the collectivists, the progressives who don’t produce wealth, but just redistribute it) is to “answer the fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes” (Prov. 26:5). Galt conducts a planetary reductio ad absurdum: he lets the looters run the world in their own way, until they run it down completely. This alone will give the lie to all of their beautiful but empty promises of “justice” and “compassion.” This alone will break their spell over the common man and pave the way for the re-emergence of society’s true leaders. Atlas doesn’t drop the world, but he does shrug…
Dagny Taggart, a railroad heiress and a brilliant and tenacious businesswoman, is targeted for recuitment, but she refuses to go on strike and tries to the very end of her strength to save the world by trying to outwit and outlast the bureaucrats. However, in the end, she, too, takes Galt’s pledge, which summarizes Ayn Rand’s philosophy of life: “I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The heroes of the novel are Nietzsche’s “supermen,” who are larger than life, beyond good and evil, above the “morality of the herd” (which is what Nietzsche called Christianity), and who live for themselves. In her thinking, this enlightened self-interest has a trickle-down effect, blessing others in the updraft of freedom and wealth that they create. Objectivism is libertarianism on steroids.
A Christian critique of Rand’s worldview (which she and her devotees developed into a philosophical system called “objectivism”) would include, among others, the following points:
- Her epistemology – her hyper-rationalism, the self-sufficiency and infallibility of man’s reason – is unsupportable, philosophically. If, as her atheism requires, reality is just molecules in motion, then so is man’s mind (brain, really), so how can one trust it to perceive reality and explain it correctly? In her worldview, my brain is made up of the same stuff as a raven, a river, or a rock – so why do I think I’m so smart? Rand can’t explain that, and she doesn’t. She just assumes it.
- Her morality – which actually boils down to social Darwinism – also lacks a solid foundation. Based in her atheism (see above), she has no justification for choosing John Galt’s honesty over the deceit of the bureaucrats, or even the violence of the looters. There is no real reason to choose life over suicide. Yet she does, thus sneaking Christian values into her system without giving religion any credit. She sits in God’s lap to slap Him in the face.
- Her politics and economics (federalism and free-market capitalism) – with which I happen to agree, largely, as the most workable applications of Christian doctrines to society in a fallen world – are unsupportable for the same reason. In these cases, she actually makes the right choices, but for the wrong reasons.
I’ll finish with a very few quotes that give the flavor of the book. (When I say “few,” keep in mind that this is a 1,000+ page book!)
- “Yet no penny of his wealth had been obtained by force or fraud; he was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.”
- “We haven’t any spiritual goals or qualities. All we’re after is material things. That’s all we care for.”
- “So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all – that I was a man who made money.”
- “Dagny, there’s nothing of any importance in life – except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. …It’s the only measure of human value.”
- “He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty.”
- “It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you.”
- “By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. …Check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
- “Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”
- “Governmental scientific inquiry is a contradiction in terms.”
- “So you think that money is the root of all evil? …Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”
- “Wealth is the produce of man’s capacity to think. …To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will.”
- “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.”
- “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.”
- “I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement.”
- “There are no evil thoughts…except one: the refusal to think.”
- “The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt.”
- [From the bad guys]: “Freedom has been given a chance and has failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary.”
- [From the bad guys]: “Man’s mind is the root of all evil. This is the day of the heart. …There once was an Age of Reason, but…this is the Age of Love.”
- “It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal.”
- “Gold is the objective value.”
- “The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think.”
- “There had been a time when he had been expected to think. Now, they did not want him to think, only to obey.”
- “This would always remain to her – the immovable conviction that evil was unnatural and temporary.”
- “To work – with no chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through college. To work – on a blank check held by every creature born, by men you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question – just to work and work and work… And this is the moral law to accept? This – a moral ideal?”
- “She turned to Galt. ‘You were first. What made you come to it?’ He chuckled. ‘My refusal to be born with original sin.’”
- “I had felt that I would kill the man who’d claim that I exist for the sake of his need – and I had known this was the highest moral feeling.”
- “I saw that the harder I worked, the more I tightened the noose around my throat, I saw that my energy was being poured down a sewer…that the whole industrial establishment of the world, with all of its magnificent machinery, its thousand-ton furnaces, its transatlantic cables, its mahogany offices, its stock exchanges, its blazing electric signs, its power, its wealth – all of it was run, not by bankers and boards of directors, but by any unshaved humanitarian in any basement beer joint, by any face pudgy with malice, who preached that virtue must be penalized for being virtue, that the purpose of ability is to serve incompetence…”
- “If any part of your uncertainty is a conflict between your heart and your mind – follow your mind.”
- [From a bad guy]: “My misery is the measure of your sin. My contentment is the measure of your virtue. …You have the privilege of strength, but I – I have the right of weakness! That’s a moral absolute!”
- [From a bad guy]: “What’s logic when people are suffering?”
- [From a bad guy]: “It’s pity that we need, pity, not logic!”
- “The desire [to kill] was…directed at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.”
- “There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”
- “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man – every man – is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose. …The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
- “Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.”
- “A rational process is a moral process. …There is no greater, nobler, more heroic act of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility for thinking. …Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. …This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.”
- “Faith is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.”
- “Virtue is not an end in itself. …Life is the reward of virtue, and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.”
- “Happiness is possible only to a rational man.”
- “Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’ – and neither is possible to man without the other.”
- “The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.”
- “Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.”
- “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral.”
- “When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite.”
- “Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved.”
- “I am, therefore I’ll think.”
- “Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality.”
- “Your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness – not pain or mindless self-indulgence – is the proof of your moral integrity.”
- “The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman… The only functions of a government are…the police…the army…the courts.”
Ayn Rand…so near, yet so far…