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What I’m Reading Now 5

Posted January 14, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

This series tracks the books I read, and has nothing to do with immigration.

What I’m Reading Now: Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns
What I Just Finished Reading: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Some thoughts on Atlas Shrugged-

More than two decades ago I was at a party in Manhattan. I had finished law school and just started working at CARECEN. A young man, also in his 20s asked me about my job. I told him I was a lawyer at CARECEN. A Wall Streeter himself, he asked me what I made. When I told him $14,000 (about $25,000 today), he became indignant. He told me the salary was immoral. I assured him that CARECEN was acting honorably and that $14,000 was all it could afford. “No”, he said, “I don’t mean CARECEN is immoral, I mean you are immoral. You could make more money just about anywhere else you chose to work. When you work at a job that pays you less than the market value of your labor, you allocate your labor inefficiently. It is immoral for you to not work for the employer who will pay you the most for the work you want to do.”

I laughed and said that by his logic, a doctor who left a lucrative plastic surgery practice in LA would be behaving immorally if he went to Africa to perform reconstructive surgery on the war wounded. “Exactly”, he replied. “If treating the war victims were the most moral course for the doctor to take, they would pay the most. They can’t, so he should stick to LA.”

I was perplexed. But a young woman came over to me after my accuser had moved on. She said, “Don’t worry, he’s an Ayn Randian.”

I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead after this strange encounter. It didn’t seem to have quite the extreme views of the second-generation Randian I had met, so I dismissed him as someone who didn’t understand his own avatar.

I didn’t think much about Rand after this until the Tea Parties began capturing attention last year. I went to a Tea Party protest and met a fellow there who started his discussion with me about Obama by saying “A is A”. Okay, I said, I guess a thing is itself. Then he kept repeating it throughout our discussion as a sort of mantra. I asked him if this was some tic he had and he muttered, “You need to start reading Ayn Rand”.

Okay, one Randian with a tea bag hanging from his hat does not a movement make.

But then I started hearing Rand invoked on FOX News, and by others among the tea baggers. The new president seemed to have awakened a new interest in Rand. News reports indicate that Rand’s books, perenially popular on the Right since 1957, have seen sales surge to over 800,000 in 2009. I figured that I should check her out again.
I went to Amazon to buy Atlas Shrugged, her magnum dopus, and looked at the first customer review.It described her as America’s greatest modern novelist and philosopher. The reviewer had written dozens of other reviews for Amazon, so I clicked on those. Virtually all were reviews of cell phones and software. I guessed that Rand’s appeal as a philosopher is primarily to those who don’t read philosophy and her appeal as a novellist is to those who revel in the semiotic of Star Trek novelizations.

Although Rand’s thousand page novel is often described as “anti-communist”, it is more accurately called “anti-Christian”. The book follows the terrorism committed by a groups of very wealthy heroes who see gold as the highest standard of moral value. One of the capitalist terrorists tells a woman who says that “Money is the root of all evil”, that she needs to run from the man who said that. Christians will recall that the quote comes from St. Paul’s relation of a saying of Jesus.

The Right wing conspirators in Atlas Shrugged say they are out to reverse Robin Hoods. They want to steal from the poor and give to the rich, because the rich are the source of all wealth. And how do you get rich? Well, most of the heroes in this book inherited their wealth from their fathers, so some sort of genetic Darwinism seems to insure that morality follows genetics.

The weird Randian assualt on traditional notions of right and wrong made her extremely suspect to ordinary conservatives when Atlas Shrugged was first published. In fact, while the novel was panned by most reviewers, the nastiest review came in the very conservative National Review.

Conservative writer and anti-communist informant Whittiker Chambers wrote the most famous review of Rand’s book. Not much that I can say that tops his invective:

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous….Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.

How bad is this book? Rand names her hero banker Midas Mulligan!

And how long can you listen to obviously very privileged people complaining about their wealth being no substitute for the love of the people? Nietzsche’s superman didn’t care what the masses thought of him, why do these whiners so crave the love of people they openly despise?

Also, there is a bit of a problem with Rand’s choice of heroes. Her men and women of the future, her capitalist avatars, run such forward looking enterprises like a steel mill and a railroad. The railroads would collapse in a few years, and the steel industry would move out of the U.S. a decade later. So much for Rand’s cred as a futurist!
There is one forward looking element. The biggest here is a woman. Dagny is the genius behind a failing railroad system. Cool. She makes it easy to figure out who the good guys are in the book because she beds each of them in turn! Booty calls let you know if the mystery man of the chapter is a moral capitalist or an immoral altruist.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the way you know someone is bad is if he tries to help someone without asking for anything in return.

Dagny, through a completely improbable series of events, is spirited away from the world of altruism, where her inherited wealth is not respected, to a Utopian community of capitalists in a place called Galt’s Gulch. It contains the wealthiest men in the world, who are on strike against a society that tries to regulate banks, that imposes labor standards and health and safety rule. In other words, a society that is insufficiently grateful to them. The heroes are collected around John Galt, an engineer and one of the few heroes in the book who did not inherit his wealth.

He is a genius who has invented an engine that runs on static electricity. (Strike Two as a futurist, Ms. Rand). And he started the strike by the ultra-rich. In his perfect society, no one borrows anything. If someone wants to use your car, that’s not a problem, but he must give value for the “loan”. In most cases, the price is 25 cents. Which to me sounded more like a gimmick to cover borrowing than like genuine full market value for the use of a car.

When Galt allows badly injured Dagny to live with him, after telling her she may not leave for a month, he expects her to pay him for the privilege. That way the market will allocate housing. She agrees, saying “I shall comply with your terms. I propose to earn my room and board by working in the capacity of your cook and housemate”. Which, we used to call prostitution. And how is this menial, sex worker role a good allocation of the talents of an educated woman? Rand strongly believed that women must worship men, and that view is reflected throughout Dagny’s relationship with Galt.

The weird sexual politics of the novel has always excited commentary. Dagny seems to sleep with everybody. She is also often the only woman on the scene. The pirate king of the capitalists, yes he is a real pirate, tells Dagny that she is the only woman the frat boys of the gulch want in their secret society. So while the heroes are depicted as uber heterosexual, the demography of the gulch points to extensive same-sex relationships, or rampant onanism.

But the real sexual charge in the gulch is money anyway. Instead of a crucifix in the cathedral of capitalism, the gulchers have erected a golden dollar sign. Like Glenn Beck, they want a return to the gold standard, and they make that known practically, by requiring that all transactions be made in gold, and symbolically, by, for example, printing golden dollar signs on their ciggies. (Strike Three!). They get the gold from the pirate king, who sinks American ships bringing relief supplies to post-war Europe after first stealing anything of value.

The book goes on and on, with a lot of nonsensical theorizing mixed in with some trite sci-fi elements. Yes, there is a death ray that falls into the hands of a drunken altruist.

If you don’t want to read the thousand-plus pages of this book, but you want to get a look at Rand’s style as well as her “philosophy”, the bext exemplar is “John Galt’s Speech”.

John Galt, lowly laborer, somehow takes over all wireless communications in the U.S. and broadcasts a very, very long speech to his fellow Americans that is supposed to convince them to rise up and install him and his group of terrorists into power.

The speech, is 60 pages long.

Think about that for a minute.

This is a novel which suddenly, and without warning or any real justification, drops a 60 page polemic into the already boring text. You can read the whole speech here, but I’ll give you a little bit of it so you can get the flavor.

“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.”

Who wouldn’t want to cuddle up with prose like that on a cold winter night?

A lot of the speech is just silly. Galt attacks the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. Okay, a lot of modern philosophers have. But he then refers to his followers as the men of the mind, seeming to contradict his own critique.

And when Galt identifies his constituency as “men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem”, one wonders if today’s teabaggers really see themselves as fitting in any of those groups.

With FOX News now promoting Rand, you have to wonder how many of their viewers are aware of the books strong anti-Christian message. Galt’s speech, in fact, reflects Rand’s own disdain for all religion:

“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door-but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.

“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors-between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason-that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.

“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.”

Makes Richard Dawkins sound almost conciliatory towards theists, doesn’t it?

At one point in his speech, Galt identifies “traders” as the most moral of people, since they spend their lives buying and selling.

So, if you think that our paragons of morality are Wall Street traders, this is your book of ethics and theology. And Bernie Madoff is your Pope.

FOX News says that Atlas Shrugged will sell 400,000 copies this year to conservatives frightened of Vladimir Illyich Hussein Obama. Glad to see them putting their money in an investment as sound as Glenn Beck’s gold bars.

Tags : ayn rand, books, what i'm reading now

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