The post below was the
last of the many faces of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and so it's time
to conclude this blog.
There's much that could
be said about the book, and I'm sure you could find lots of
discussions with a quick search online, so I'll try not to say too much.
Besides, it's been well over a year since I finished the book so it's
not exactly fresh in my mind. But after this long journey, it feels
appropriate to sum up my feelings.
The philosophy
First I guess I should
get the political/economic stuff out of the way. She is very right
wing. I am pretty left wing. We were never going to see eye-to-steady, perceptive eye. There is one thing I'll say in her favour: she
paints a convincing picture of very-large-scale industry – eg steel, oil, railways – as something very important to society,
something society would collapse without. And yeah she romanticises industry, but she does a good job of it.
But apart from that,
her whole philosophy – the one that apparently inspires a lot of
right wing politicians – is well, very right wing I suppose. I don't like it. I mean, she has lots of components to her philosophy, things about reality
and perception etc, but that's not really important, it's the moral
and economic side of things that I take issue with. The way I
see it, I have 3 fundamental problems with her philosophy:
1. She believes
everyone should act in their own self-interest, and should be
allowed to do so without hindrance. And you’re entitled to all
the rewards that you might earn from doing so. You can’t really
argue with this, either you feel this way or you don’t, and a lot
of right wingers probably agree with it. BUT I think she (and no
doubt other right wingers) justify this position by making out that
it will benefit society as a whole. Which leads me to the point 2.
2. She’s not
grounded in reality. She thinks that if the great minds are left to
run business as they want, with all the market freedoms and
competition that this should entail, everyone will benefit ie have houses, railways, food etc...but
obviously that doesn’t happen in reality. She paints a picture of
honest industrialists with good old-fashioned values of quality and
sustainability, and the vast profits they make are only fair.
But oh, wait, that’s not what really happens when you have free-market
capitalism.
Instead companies focus solely on making as much profit
for their employees and shareholders as possible, and quality and
any other consequences are somewhere lower down on the priorities
list. To be fair, she wrote this in the 50’s, and maybe the
effects of full-blown capitalism weren’t really happening yet, so
I won’t blame her too much for that. But just because her system
works in a novel – in a fictional world full of people hugely
caricatured to fit her polarised views – that doesn’t mean it’ll
work with real people.
Another classic right
wing view she has is that if you work hard and succeed, then you’ve
earned your money, and if you don’t, well, you deserve to be poor and starving.
So obviously again, she’s not basing her philosophy in reality, and
like many right wingers, doesn’t acknowledge that in the real world
not everyone has equal opportunities.
Ok if I'm honest, it’s not
something she explicitly addresses, at least not in Atlas Shrugged, but I
get the impression that she's probably aware of unequal opportunities,
but she just doesn’t give a damn. Leading me to the final
problem....
3. She's a
psychopath. Well ok that’s not a clinical diagnosis, maybe a more
apt expression is ‘cold-hearted bastard’. If you’re intelligent, capable
and driven, then you’ll succeed, and she’s very happy with that.
What if you don’t get the chance to have a good education, or your
parents don’t bring you up to be motivated? Or, to take a slightly
less ambiguous picture, what if you’re just naturally stupid? Or what
if you have a learning difficulty? Well, I think Ayn’s response
would be: ‘tough shit’. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s
the impression I get. I will point out at that, in one part of the
book, hundreds of people die in a train accident, and Ayn basically
says that, because none of those people buy into her individualistic
philosophy, they had it coming. Again you can’t really argue with her, there’s no fundamental counter-argument to the ‘tough
shit’ philosophy. But you would hope that it wasn’t the
philosophy of the people who run your government....
And, for the record,
she cheats. This is fiction, so she can give the characters whatever
traits she wants. So the heroes of the book, the rich industrialists
who share her values and ideals, are tall and handsome, fiercely
intelligent, entirely rational, just a little bit witty and aloof, and always
completely right. Meanwhile, the bad guys, the people who want to
regulate the heroes and redistribute the wealth are, without
exception, stupid, fat, irrational, bitter and corrupt. I’m not
saying it’s coimpletely the other way round in the real world, but it’s kind of a cheap trick on Ayn's part.
So that’s what I have
to say about her philosophy. No doubt there’s some really
interesting questions to ask about, among other things, her position on women and
feminism. To be honest it’s not something I paid that much
attention to in Atlas Shrugged. I did read one discussion about a
rape scene in the book between two of the main characters. I have to
admit that it didn’t seem like rape when I read it – but if it
was, she wasn’t portraying it as a bad thing. Either way, she
definitely seems to like a bit of violence in her sex...and maybe
that’s ok, as long as it’s all consensual...but it doesn’t help
her image of being a bit of a psycho.
The book
This blog wasn’t
meant to be about the philosophy though. It was, I suppose, aimed at gently teasing her writing style. To be honest, I actually
thought Atlas Shrugged was a pretty good read, despite the length, and despite
the long and rather boring rants she peppers through the book to put
across her philosophy. This is not the height of literature by any
means, but she was into writing and Hollywood films too, and she knows how to write a novel – the storyline is very interesting, there’s
plenty of suspense, violence, sex and romance, and in some ways I
actually quite like the language. And, after working on
this blog, I actually started to notice the same facial stylings in
other books. Take, for example, Shantaram (p286):
'They wore a faintly
neurotic look of startled indignation.'
Ok, in terms of quality
of writing I'd put Shantaram in the same category as Atlas Shrugged,
but how about something from a classy affair like The Great Gatsby (p38):
'He smiled
understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those
rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may
come across four or give times in life. It faced—or seemed to
face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated
on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood
you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as
you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to
convey.'
Crikey.
UPDATE: as it so happens, this very same face is taken on by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio in the new film adaption of Gatsby. Who do you think does a better job, me or Leo?
So maybe we were being
a little unfair on Ayn. Whatever.
Anyway, this wasn't as brief
a conclusion as I'd planned, but it's a bloody long book, and I've
just saved you reading the whole damn thing, so I make no apologies.
What next? Well perhaps more interesting than talking philosophy and economics would be to explore facial expressions more, psychologically, or in literature, or even how they're used in many, many different ways on the net. But that's for another time.
Thank you for allowing
me to share my journey with you.
The end.
