Book review: Atlas Shrugged
ATLAS SHRUGGED
by Ayn Rand.
Murder mystery for philosophers: who kills the Mind of Man?
Ayn Rand has written a novel like no other: a detective story of philosophy.
The main character, a valiant railroad executive, Dagny Taggart, sees society crumbling before her eyes. In all fields, great thinkers are vanishing. Who is making them vanish and why? All joy in life seems to be evaporating. What invisible destroyer is doing this, and how?
To solve the mystery, Dagny must correctly identify her allies and her enemies; discover their motives and their goals; and bring herself to understand the root philosophy defining and motivating them.
The real hero of the book is the philosophy of reason (individualistic capitalism); the real villain, the philosophy of the irrational (collectivist socialism.) Atlas Shrugged is the only book which has ever attempted to depict every implication of philosophy, rational and irrational, capitalist and collectivist, in the form of a detective investigation. Every field of human endeavor is represented in various characters: industry, banking, music, literature, journalism, science, medicine, and philosophy. The logical consequences of both philosophies are drawn out exact and unblinking detail. Metaphysics, ethics, economics, aesthetics, epistemology are all vividly presented on stage.
To perform this examination with pristine clarity and scientific rigor, Ayn Rand must present what an irrational society would be like without the rational elements present: in her fictional People’s State of America, all the men of ability, the men of the mind (the capitalists), go on strike. For contrast, the rational society where no taint of the irrational is presented in Galt’s Gulch, the Utopia of Greed.
Reviewers who complain that life is not so simple, not so ‘black and white’ as this, have missed the point. Our society is a gray mix of liberty and tyranny, capitalism and socialism, wealth, poverty, progress, barbarism. The liberals and progressives have always claimed credit for (and even named themselves after) the liberty and progress. Capitalism has always been blamed for the poverty and barbarism. But which actually causes which? An analysis is needed. The act of analysis, by its very nature, reduces complexities to their elements. To criticize the act of analysis for being ‘simplistic’ is disingenuous.
If you knew two tubes of paint, when mixed together, produced gray, you would, in order to find out which tube was actually white, squeeze each tube onto the palette separately, and see each pigment in its pure state. Once you have done that, and found out the tube on the left is producing pure black (and not the white it says on its label), it would be absurd for the pro-left apologist to claim that your test was too ‘black and white’; or to say, ‘but the end result mix is shades of gray! Pure white and pure black do not exist in nature!’ Well, obviously; but so what? The end result mix is not what we are examining; we want to see which of the two tubes is to blame for the ever-darker shades.
Again, those reviewers who complain that Ayn Rand heroes are tall and handsome and her villains are cowardly sniveling wretches, forget against what position Ayn Rand is arguing. The lovers of unreason in this world do not attempt to defend their philosophy with logic; they defend it by inducing their opponents into compromise. They defend it by Ad Hominem attacks against their accusers. They defend it by being ambiguous.
Hence, any author bold enough to attack the lovers of unreason, must depict characters who are uncompromising. The characters must not be ambiguous. The characters must have integrity. For an artist, this integrity means even the character’s outward appearance must reflect inward virtues. For Ayn Rand to have introduced a sympathetic villain, or an impure anti-hero, or even an ugly hero, would be as much as to deny the whole premise and purpose of the book, which is to show these things a beautiful and heroic. Ayn Rand would lose the debate by her own default (which is, by the way, the only way she says a hero can be made to lose.)
As for the length of the speeches, remember we are dealing with a book about ideas, and the implications of ideas. Abstract ideas must be put across in speeches.
As for the vehemence and repetitiveness with which Ayn Rand expresses herself, it must be excused on the ground that she is the only author in history ever to defend and praise the mind of man, fully, without compromise, in its every aspect and implication: let her say her defense more than once. It has never been said before, nor often enough since.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
