Reader D. Vision, responding to yesterday’s piece about the need for a new Enlightenment, has some recommended reading for us:
Have you read Atlas Shrugged? It’s a must. Rand put her finger directly on the problem: the parasites of collectivism.
In a strange nexus, it’s all the same: anti-reason, anti-logic, anti-freedom, anti-life. It’s about control and distribution, equality, and dependence rather than freedom, production, quality, and independence. All such delusions are necessary to float collectivism–to maintain feelings above reason.
In the next century there will be great potential for collectivism to harness if its delusions are not countered and disarmed. The creep of “need” threatens to swallow us all in a mutually dependent liability that cannot allow freedom.
I did, indeed, read Atlas Shrugged a number of years ago. My main reaction to the book at the time was annoyance at having been forced to plod through an awful lot of really long speeches to get to the few sex scenes, which weren’t that great, anyway, seeing as I tended to picture Dagny Taggart as Ms. Rand herself…and that just sort of spoiled it. On an only slightly more serious note, I did write about Atlas Shrugged on this very blog a couple of years ago.
I tend to think that Rand diagnosed the problem along the way to coming up with a cure that is just as bad as — if not in fact a restatement of — the problem itself. D. Vision is absolutely right about the destructiveness of the anti-reason, anti-freedom delusions that manifested themselves in the 20th century (and remain with us today) via collectivist theories put into practice. But as Whittaker Chambers — himself a former communist who had seen the light — pointed out in his review of Atlas Shrugged some half a century ago, collectivism isn’t the only error into which we can fall, and it isn’t the only foundation on which massive delusions can be constructed:
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.
Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
If I take exception to Chambers’ analysis, it’s only because I always saw a real-world implementation of Rand’s ideas as leading to a completely different kind of disaster. Near the end of Atlas Shrugs, we see a scene in which a retired judge is marking up a copy of the US constitution to make it a fit with the new world that’s emerging. (I will remark in passing that, as an intellectual exercise, I see nothing wrong with doing this kind of thing.) He adds the following to the beginning of the constitution:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.
Imagine courts applying this principle with the same zeal by which they now use the Interstate Commerce Clause to give the federal government final authority of every aspect of our lives. Under such a system, there could be no speed limit, nor health code, nor — presumably — requirement that an individual be properly certified before practicing medicine. The sale and distribution of any conceivable weapon, drug, or toxic substance would have to be legal. Child pornography would be legal. Maybe child prostitution as well.
Of course, such a system would not be tenable for any long period of time and would eventually break down into chaos or the dictatorship that Chambers describes. It’s hard to imagine that codifying Rand’s ideals of individual liberty into law would result in a dictatorship, unless we take the time to contrast the rhetoric of Marxism with the reality of its implementation. Abstract principles always work great on paper. In the real world, their success rate is a lot spottier.
One other thought: Chambers’ observations about Rand’s idolizing of “productive achievement” are interesting. If a Singularitarian religion were ever to emerge, the sacred nature of productive achievement — or just flat-out technological development — would likely be a core doctrine. The trends and movements and evolutionary leaps that we look at today are no less subject to delusional thinking than any that have come before. We must be ever vigilant.
UPDATE: Interesting related thoughts atOne Small Voice.