RSS Feed MenuIt’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The Moratorium on Brains,” than which I reread no farther. (Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.) A train is carrying 300 passengers through the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco. America is falling altogether to pieces, its citizens starving to death, because the prime movers — Rand’s term for the productive men and women on whom economic creation and therefore life-or-death depend — have called a strike. They are hanging out in a mountain valley that their leader, Mr. John Galt, has cleverly hidden from the world by means of refractor-ray shield.
The world scarcely has diesel locomotives. When the one attached to that train breaks down, the only replacements are coal-burning, which is a problem, because the train is about to pass through an eight-mile tunnel that is not properly ventilated for locomotives of this type. It happens that an important looter — Rand’s term for the half-wits running and ruining the country — is on the train and has strong feelings about getting to San Francisco. His name is Kip Chalmers. “It’s not my problem to figure out how you get the train through the tunnel, that’s for you to figure out!” Kip Chalmers screams at a station agent. “But if you don’t get me an engine and don’t start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!”
This is persuasive. “The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power — the power of life or death.” And so the station officials, knowing that the loss of their jobs means the loss of their lives, call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation.
But that isn’t why I stopped reading. I stopped because Rand thinks they deserve it.
…
There is so much to be said against Rand as an artist. There is the inept dialogue — characters begin a great many sentences by shouting each other’s names or saying “You know”; the heroes speak, every one of them, in exactly the same voice; the averagely intelligent advance the plot by blurting out their secrets. There is the Girl Scout banality of Atlas Shrugged’s heroine, who seems to have escaped from the young-adult section. There is the preposterous omnicompetence of the heroes, equally at home on the Harvard faculty or in a Vin Diesel movie, and the endless gushing about their exalted feelings, Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what she has not earned with character development. There is that editorial discipline which gave us John Galt’s speech.
I don’t care. I don’t require of my artists that they be perfect craftsmen; I require that they inspire me. What is sad to me about Rand is that she could, but that the creator of Gail Wynand could create only one; that she could no longer imagine him when she looked out at mankind; that what she showed us instead was her need to reassure herself, in terms frankly delusional, of her superiority to it.
Jason Lee Steorts, National Review, “The Greatly Ghastly Rand“, August 30, 2010.
While Whittaker Chambers’ famous 1957 condemnation of Rand may sound over-torqued half a century later: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” It remains true that Ayn Rand seems to revel in the death and destruction that follows by disregarding her philosophy: most famously in the ghoulish scene in Atlas Shrugged where Rand details the suffocation of the passengers on a train as it enters a tunnel. Rand explains how everyone on the train deserved to die because they held incorrect ideas:
“It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.”
Rand proceeds to coldly condemn the ‘inexcusable’ intellectual errors of sixteen men and women on the train. A sample:
“The man in Seat 5, Car No.7, was a worker who believed that he had ‘a right’ to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not. The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had ‘a right’ to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.”
And so on for 1,000 words. She blithely writes of their suffocation and death:
“These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.”
Rand’s writing carries other elements of disdain and malevolence. Atlas Shrugged concludes with Rand’s heroes safe in Colorado while the more normal Eddie Willers is left stranded and alone in the middle of the desert. One of the many sins of the villain of her other famous novel, The Fountainhead, is that he turns what ought to be an architectural work of art into a care center for “subnormal children.” Rand writes how evil it was that art was wasted on these unworthy sub-lives as she describes “their eyes staring vacantly, the stare of death before which no world existed.” (This episode that seems to show Nietzsche’s influence on Rand.)
FrumForum, “Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand“, July 31st, 2010.
SFTor1 // Aug 23, 2010 at 5:12 pm
So this is why no one in Europe has ever read her. She has always been a total non-entity there. I was always wondering why.
It’s not so unusual that it is because the work is entirely unacceptable.
Maistre // Aug 23, 2010 at 5:25 pm
I was wondering how Steorts managed to write something that wasn’t awful. Turns out that he’s just been reading FrumForum!
Also, maybe he decided to stop trying to sound like Jay Nordlinger.
easton // Aug 23, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Of course, Conservatives and Liberals alike know the Rand is for perpetual adolescents whining me, me, me. I promise you, I could put 1,000 of her followers on a remote island and in a week they would be eating there shoes. They simply have no concept of the foundation of civilization, that such selfishness would only get you dead right quick.
And, of course, Rand herself never saw fit to have children, either naturally or through adoption. She only could mimic being human, she never quite understood what it was to be a human, in the fullest potential.
Alex Knepper // Aug 24, 2010 at 9:40 am
-sigh-
People misunderstand her. And, as usual, that’s often her own fault.
Carney // Aug 24, 2010 at 11:48 am
easton, whatever her flaws, and they were many, Rand did not mean, by the word “selfishness”, what ordinary people, indeed everyone else, means by the word. In effect, she invented a new meaning, which has failed to catch on, the failure of which causes significant misunderstanding of much of what she advocated.
Observing this, I have advised others I know not to try to re-define or reclaim other words that have negative connotations.
Maistre // Aug 24, 2010 at 12:12 pm
@Carney. Very true. Rand really meant “eudaimonic.” She chose “selfishness” in order to exaggerate her differences with the mainstream western philosophical tradition.
Chris // Aug 24, 2010 at 12:30 pm
“@Carney. Very true. Rand really meant “eudaimonic.” She chose “selfishness” in order to exaggerate her differences with the mainstream western philosophical tradition.”
So Rand is really Aristotle?
brandon // Aug 24, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Rand’s philosophy was way too extreme for the average American. One of the great things about William F. Buckley was that he understood that associating with her and other fringe types like the John Birch Society was bad for conservatism.
Those of us on the right today really need someone like Buckley who has the guts to call out those figures who are bad for the movement like Glenn Beck and Joseph Farrah. Unfortunately, there is no one with the possible exception of Rush Limbaugh who carries that kind of weight today in Republican circles. I don’t dislike Rush but he is not the intellectual par of Buckley.
Drosz // Aug 24, 2010 at 1:21 pm
When one reads Rand, it really should be noted that she, like all of us, was a product of her environment. You can’t really look at Atlas Shrugged from a 2010 perspective and get what I think she was really railing against. Today’s “Socialists” as defined by some conservatives is not really the same thing Rand was warning against. She grew up watching the Soviets and Chinese implement communism in gruesome detail and real time…and she didn’t like it. That’s about the most thoughtful I can really get about her philosophy although I have a soft spot for libertarianism.
Because really one should also note that John Galt isn’t Rand’s view of the average businessman, Willers is who Rand believes represents the average American. Galt is the out of sight out of mind ‘they’ that we reference when we say, “Can you believe ‘they’ can do that now?” (Although ironically many times the ‘they’ we are referring to are government agencies, NASA, etc) Rand has contempt for average intellect and average lives. Her plea is to let folks like herself (John Galt) do what they do best and create the jobs, art, and wonders of the world the rest of us are incapable of creating. She doesn’t show pity for those folks because they’re the folks she is railing against. They wouldn’t let Galt and those like him do what they do best.
It’s really a simple concept. It’s the reaction every child or teenager has had toward others that have controlled their behaviors. Remember “A Christmas Story” when Ralphie’s mom washes his mouth out with soap and he has the daydream about going blind from soap poisoning and how sorry his parents would be if he visited as a blind beggar? Atlas Shrugged’s concept was very similar to that in my opinion, but it took Rand thousands of pages to tell the story instead of in 5 minutes by parody.
lcandell // Aug 24, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Ayn Rand was an arrogant, nasty, selfish bitch whose objectivist sophistry should be forever consigned to the dustbin of history.
easton // Aug 24, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Chris, ha, good one.
Rand writes how evil it was that art was wasted on these unworthy sub-lives as she describes “their eyes staring vacantly, the stare of death before which no world existed.”
I worked at a camp for the mentally retarded, some severe and profound, when I was 17. One camper had no eyes, had a shunt to relieve fluid pressure in his brain, and was severely and profoundly retarded. One day we took the campers into a pool, and the look on his face as he stood there with the sun on his face (his head upward towards it) as the water splashed at his midriff, was resplendent. He was a completely within the moment in ways I never have been, nor will be. There is always something else distracting me, even if it is the vague awareness of time passing. Where she saw vacuity and emptiness, I sensed the very presence of the divine, and for those atheists out there at least you can acknowledge the awareness of the marvelous range of experience that human existence can give us. A severely and profoundly retarded young man, blind, without speech, had within himself the capacity for simple sublime joy, without the encumbrances of ego or worry.
So yeah, Rand is an ignorant jackass.
Maistre // Aug 24, 2010 at 6:32 pm
@Chris. Yes. Once you cut through all the bluster, Rand turns out to be a Aristotelian virtue ethicist. This is actually, among Objectivists, a mainstream interpretation of Rand.
Sinan // Aug 24, 2010 at 7:05 pm
I was disgusted with that book when I read it in college in the 70s. I was disgusted with Ayn Rand when I saw her interviews. Then I became thoroughly disgusted with her when the great Helen Mirren played her in the bio movie. Not because of Helen who was superb but because of what she did to her poor husband. What a grotesque monster Ayn was.
Nanotek // Aug 25, 2010 at 11:39 am
What Rand got right was that no one has a right to your life … nor society …
hopitab // Aug 25, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I read all of Ayn Rand, cover to cover, in a couple of weeks when I was fifteen. It was a disastrous thing to do; my parents understood this but were incapable of censoring my reading. It took me almost a decade to get it out of my mind. She’s the perfect author for young teens with nothing else much in their heads.