Book Review
The world according to Ayn Rand
Review by Geoffrey Dow
Managing Editor
True North Perspective
|
The end of the world has a long pedigree in western literature, in the modern sense going back at least to H.G. Wells' Martians.
The appeal of an apocalypse to a writer is easy to see; there's nothing quite so drmatic as the End of the World. Provided the story assumes at least a few survivors, it allows the writer a more or less blank slate for social satire, adventure, horror or the romance of Starting Civilization Over (and, presumably, Better).
For the reader is the chance to vicariously live the ultimate adventure, assuming himself (I suspect the genre is more popular with men than with women, and with young men especially — how better for a teenaged boy to prove his mettle than to survive and prosper when all around him has been destroyed?) to be one of the few survivors, one of the brave, the smart, the strong.
Despite the undeniable appeal to adolescent power-fantasies that lie at the heart of most such stories, they usually at least pay lip-service to the idea that the destruction of civilization, along with billions of human lives, is in fact a tragedy, no matter that the survivors have a great time — feeling "more alive" than ever, as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
If adolescent male power fantasies are at the heart of the disaster novel genre, there is more than a little irony in the fact that Ayn Rand's shamelessly didactic and very long (at around 645,000 words) novel, Atlas Shrugged, was written by a woman.
Published in 1957 and set at some vague point in the then relatively near future, Atlas Shrugged depicts a world falling apart, with the United States as the last country still holding on to a vestige of capitalism.
But it is a country under seige: by corrupt businessmen and union leaders, by self-serving government officials, and by ordinary scum. Rand pulls no punches in portraying the vast majority of the human race as moral and intellectual cowards at best, as active promoters of death and destruction at worst.
Railroad heiress Dagny Taggart is one of the few competent "men" (from the perspective of the early 21st century there is something really archaic in Rand's use of man and men to refer to human beings in general, but since it is her usage, I will follow it here) in a world seething with corruption and malice.
As the novel opens, the economy is in serious decline (Fifth Avenue is teeming with "bums" and, "...not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty") and a vague fear stalks the hearts of the few remaining good men. Indeed, within eight years, and despite her heroic efforts to save it against literally impossible odds, Dagny's once vast transcontinental railroad is reduced to a single, broken line barely keeping east and west in touch; the cities are going dark and starvation is spreading across the continent, having leapt the oceans like a contagion from the "People's States" that have settled on the rest of world like vampires.
The entire world has been bled dry by "moochers and looters", every government run by self-dealing thugs who promise "the people" everything on the one hand while more or less systematically destroying their respective economies on the other.
It is a nightmarish in which successful businessmen are forced to divert their profits to keep open incompetent and even criminal competitors, where collective "sharing" drives men to sink to the lowest common denominator to avoid being singled out (and forced to work harder) for their success. It is a world of absolute moral and philosophical relativism, in which the dominant ethic is that "no one" can say what is right or wrong (except the increasingly totalitarian State) and "no one" ever accepts responsibility for anything.
Admittedly, and despite a pulpish quality to the prose and characters devoid of any shades of grey, Rand paints a compelling portrait of a society undergoing a complete collapse — think of Zimbabwe on a world-wide scale. Her elegiac paens to the vigorous industrialism which built New York's sky-scrapers is affecting and disturbing. Even her brief acknowledgment of the inevitable deaths of hard-working farmers towards the novel's end are moving, despite the fact they (and billions like them around the world) are merely considered what would now be called "collateral damage".
You see, it isn't just the corrupt and the dissolute, the criminals and the weak-minded followers, who are destroying the world. In the world according the Rand, the end is inevitable, but the Good Guys are giving it quite a push to speed the process along.
In the world according to Rand, the destruction of civilization and the death of billions of men, women and children is not a tragedy. In fact, it is a Good Thing, a necessary cleansing, a man-made Flood with a self-selected cast of survivors boarding the Ark.
Atlas Shrugged's narrative tension is derived from Dagny's refusal to accept the inevitable. She, and a few other hold-outs, like her one-time lover, the steel magnate and inventor Hank Reardon, are fighting the good fight, or so they believe. Shrugging off crippling taxation and regulations, they struggle on against hopeless odds, consciously determined to save a world the reader soon enough knows is beyond saving.
For the Good Guys — the free thinkers, the industrialists, the few good artists, the very few honest workmen (but especially the industrialists) — are all mysteriously vanishing. In the office one day, simply gone the next.
For much of the novel, Dagny is convinced there is a man she calls "the Destroyer" who is ridding the world of the competent and the honest and the able. Even when she learns the truth, that the Destroyer is not evil, but one of the Good Guys — indeed, the Greatest of the Good Guys — still she refuses to accept the inevitable, despite having fallen in love with him.
For the Good Guys have gone on strike. The fruit of their labour, of their minds is being stolen from them; they have given up the world, they say, left it to its own devices.
Except that they are also doing their best to actively destroy it. The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld somehow manages to sink just about every trans-oceanic vessel going to or coming from the United States; and Dagny's first lover, Francisco d'Anconia, heir to the world's copper supply(!), systematically destroys nearly all the copper mines in the world.
The Good Guys know the end is coming but they have no intention of leaving the world to a natural death.
And so it goes. Civilization — and billions of people — perish.
This is Rand's idea of a happy ending: a slaughter so vast it makes the Holocaust seem like a stubbed toe on history's long march to the bottom.
The novel ends with the a scene as close as Rand can manage to humour — Dagny is planning to rebuild her railroad and Hank Rearden jokes that she, "...will probably try to take the shirt off my back with the freight rates she's going to charge, but — I'll be able to meet them." (Who will be around to buy his products is a question Rand does not address.)
They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail. But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.
"The road is cleared," said Galt. "We are going back to the world."
He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.
Were this not an influential book, I wouldn't bother with it. The world is full of theoreticians and philosophers whose models for Utopia would work just fine if it were not for the unfortunate complication of people.
The early Soviets were convinced they could create a "new man", if only society was built anew — sorry about the 20 million people who were the "collateral damage" of that Great Dream; the Chinese Great Leap Forward would make farmers of philosophers and neo-cons everywhere really seem to believe (or did, until very recently) that wealth really will "trickle down" if only business is "unshackled" from "excessive" regulation and taxation.
And Rand? Well Rand seems to believe that most of the human race is garbage in need of disposal. Once that job has been done, then comes the millenium!
As I said, I wouldn't be talking about this book were it not taken seriously. Not just by the tin-hat brigade or survivalists jealously guarding their ten-year supplies of canned goods in remote parts of North America, but by people like Alan Greespan and Clarence Thomas, along with the usual suspects in Libertarian and neo-conservative think-tanks.
Like many philosophies, Rand's objectivism has a seductive simplicity at its base. Who wouldn't want to believe that all his problems would be solved if only "they" didn't interfere with us?
Where Rand gets strange, and from whence springs her novel's monstrous conceit, is the utter extreme to which she takes her major concept, that of rational egoism or rational self-interest.
In the world according to Rand, "...it is both irrational and immoral to act against one's self-interest." Charity and altruism are questionable qualities at best; "enforced" (as by taxation, for instance), they are inevitably "evil".
"Rational self-interest" means that it is moral for a productive man to keep all that he has created, only dealing with others in voluntary mutual trade. In the world according to Rand, taxation and government — any form of collectivism — with the notable exception of the military, to protect the nation against foreign aggression, and the police and courts, to protect men's property rights (property rights being the basis of all other liberties), is Evil.
To Ayn Rand, any other form of collective action is a form of theft, of extortion. If a man has an idea for a factory, and the money to build it, he can "trade" with individual men for their labour, but let there be no doubt that trade is a one-time thing. His idea is what created the value of the factory, and what Marx would call the "labour-value" is worth no more and no less than what the market will bear. (That market being, of course, entirely free of labour unions or anything else which might serve to alter the balance of power.
At first glance, the idea even seems to make a fair amount of sense. In theory.
But like the totalitarians she so detested, Rand's theory very quickly leads to power-imbalances that would see the entire world reduced to a state which would make the slums of Mexico City seem a marvel of social and economic equality. The man who "builds" one factory and makes a successful go of it, will soon build another, and another. Before long he will will offer his competitors offers they "can't refuse" and find himself with a monopoly in his field and a strangle-hold on his labour-force.
In the real world, the vicious competition for jobs at ever-decreasing wages would breed crime and despair, and the factory-owner would find himself paying ever-higher taxes to keep his economic slaves in line or in prison. In the real world, he would retreat from the decaying streets of the city, first to "gated communities" and then into armed compounds, while the market for his products grew ever-smaller.
In the real world, it wouldn't be long at all before another holocaust was necessary, to cleanse the world yet again of the losers in her social-Darwinian Utopia.
In the real world, human beings are so much more complex than Rand's simplistic models would have us believe. Whether you like it or not, human beings are not purely homo economicus; we are not (only) rational actors in the tales of our lives.
In real world, most of us consider purely rational actors to be psychopaths, or robots at best.
All philosophers build simplified models of reality in order to explain that which is. Nevertheless, good philosophers attempt to match their models to reality and are willing to change their models over time, seeking to make the model come ever closer to matching reality.
Bad philosophers stick rigidly to the model and, in all seriousness, propose genocide when reality fails to have the good sense to match the model.
Ayn Rand was a very bad philosopher indeed and her "masterpiece" is an evil book, by any truly objective standard.
13 March 2009 — Return to cover.
______