Notes on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
I started reading Ayn Rand this year, starting with "Anthem", then "We the Living", and then "The Fountainhead", and finally "Atlas Shrugged". Here are some of my thoughts about the latter two.
These are daring books. The Fountainhead deftly and expertly puts its finger directly on the issue; it focuses the lens of debate so that we can see clearly now the stark line that has been distorted and blurred by so many confusing voices. Rand was not the first to identify the primary source of political friction, but through her fiction she has given us one of the most clear illustrations of the matter: the individual versus the collective.
The Fountainhead, as nearly all of Rand's writing, condemns the collective--that feeling of altruism that some use to impel others to self-sacrifice and instill them with guilt. That guilt is just a tool to power and the satisfaction of a parasitic greed and envy, the real dark psychological force underlying communism which masquerades as selflessness. Both books extol the primacy of the individual; the source of creativity, inspiration. Rand holds that the majesty of a reasoning mind belongs solely to an individual and that there is no such thing as a group mind. She dares to let man out from under the punishment of hatred and condemnation espoused by every religion and societal construction of man since the beginning of time, without the temptation to supply a god.
The Fountainhead primarily concentrates on the creativity of Howard Roark and his anti-pole, the power-seeking second-hander Toohey who lacks (or disavows) his own ability and seeks to gain power through subjugating that which he could never be--namely, the creator. Atlas Shrugged focuses more on the broader effect of the Prime Movers, individuals of tremendous inventive and motive power: Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D'Anconia, Ellis Wyatt, Ken Dannager, and at the pinnacle, the stratospheric John Galt. While Roark experiences ridicule and scorn, even to the point of ruin, but escapes, these giants of Atlas Shrugged are persecuted to the point of destruction, having been impelled to guilt and forced to supply their genius to the world for the benefit of the masses. Ultimately Galt discovers the game and refuses to supply his genius and energy to the world of the looters, pulling the Prime Movers one by one in protest from the looters' grasp, stopping the motor of the world.
The Fountainhead, being written first, is missing the crucial relation of the creator to the rest of the world. The follow-on which overshadows it, Atlas Shrugged, supplies much of the missing material, but there are fundemental assumptions about human nature that I take issue with.
In Atlas Shrugged, the struggle for survival is addressed, though it primarily ignores the violence of human nature until the descent into chaos at the end. These things are not present in the Fountainhead; Rand dismisses them with a flick of the wrist. These are absolutely essential parts of existence in nature, from the smallest and weakest passive plant to the fiercest predator, all along the food chain. The struggle for life--and survival--is the pain and destruction and torture of violence, competition, predation. This an absolutely essential part of humanity's existence and cannot lightly be dismissed as does Rand. The characters in the Fountainhead are not violent; there isn't physical abuse, murder, and destruction, but mostly intellectual and psychological deceit on the part of the collectivists. This ignores an important impulse inherent in human nature. Rand's view of man as heroic and rational I regard not as its natural state, but a state to strive after. She assumes, wrongly, that this pinnacle is the natural state and that the creep of evil, collectivism, is primarily responsible for our inability to reach that height of rationalism and pride. Alas, but human nature is flawed.
The Fountainhead is remarkable but incomplete. Though Atlas Shrugged is needed to complete the story, in the Fountainhead, she does not fully address the question: what can be done against collectivists? Retreat from them, shun them. Be self-sufficient and refuse to let them take what they can. Howard Roark does this in the Fountainhead. But it is not enough when the collectivists are prepared to use force to take from you what they demand. Aggression is not something that can be reasoned with or escaped. It demands growing concessions that cannot be satisfied. It is a force of nature of ever-growing hunger and power; living your own life in a self-sufficient manner (as is done in Atlas Shrugged in the mystical land of Atlantis) is not enough. There is evil beyond that of the passive-aggressiveness of the collective; there is aggression and murder in man's very spirit; it is freely chosen, and it cannot be denied as the Fountainhead does. It must be fought; on the individual level and on a larger scale. Sometimes this struggle becomes a hot war.
We must recognized that it is not possible to shield yourself with an impenetrable barrier; an island, a fortress that can withstand the siege of aggression, nor escape like those in Atlas Shrugged. Every fortress has a weak point or can be overrun and crushed. No shield and no armor can protect against all arrows and swords. A man has a hard skull to protect his soft brain, to protect his fragile logic and reason from the scorching wind, searing heat, and eroding sands of open exposure, but it cannot withstand a direct blow from an aggressor armed with steel. No helmet and no protection is enough. Survival depends not on being armored, or being quick enough to escape and abandon one's possessions and life's work; but by being able to wield weapons in defense, even preemption. To strike an enemy before he can strike you. Kill or be killed. The fundamental struggle of existence. We can see those pacifist forms of life are vegetables, pasture animals--sitting on their hands waiting for slaughter for fear to tarnish their souls with guilt. But those highly developed, those strong, swift, powerful, and even beautiful creatures, be they insect, bird, snake, or mammal, cannot wait to be slaughtered by some greater predator, but fight for survival. Those animals can strike first--kill first--when presented a with a threat. In Rand's philosophical work, she regards it immoral for any man to initiate to the use of force. Is preemption ever moral? For survival we must recognize it may at times be essential, but is it ever moral? Rand must answer in the negative. But how can survival be immoral? Ah, a conundrum is born. But more on that some other time.
We have been taught, and we believe after thousands of years of civilization, that man is placed atop the food chain because man has been given intellect, or alternatively, conscience; because man has evolved a large brain and a large heart--emotions, the ability to communicate and cooperate. But this is only partially so. It also is because we can wield weapons and can plan to avert impending doom, though it not be immediate; we can subvert, deflect, weaken, and destroy the forces of man and nature that would destroy us before they become imminent. From the first wooden club to today's antibiotics; we live on to develop higher because of our willingness to kill first.
This is an inescapable part of our existence as humans. It is not a question of morality, but of reality, and our guilt over our existence--our survival in the face of aggression--is our own making; it is a psychological consequence of our neurological ability to see ourselves in other's places, to imagine suffering how they suffer, and to feel remorse.
All of these forces are mixed in humanity's complex nature. It is not an external force, forbidden knowledge, or a perversion. The nature of life is to kill, consume, and compete without apology in order to survive. It is not solely human nature, it is nature. No creator need put sin in our hearts, nor evil be chosen by Eve, no fall from grace; it is bred into our genes, from the first bacteria. Kill or be killed. No societal norms or conventions or social constructions or imposed morality will ever correct the inherent will to survive that is a part of humanity, arising out of our evolution, and continued existence, as sophisticated predators. This predatory nature insures there will never be a utopia, no matter how far technology develops or our thinking progresses. The utopia that Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged, while theoretically pure and self-consistent, is impossible with the unalterable nature of life.
In Rand's Atlantis there is no government, only individuals trading towards their own self interest, with each trade bringing mutual benefit to the involved parties. This is the purity of capitalism that is unassailable, but it is the ideal that can only be approached asymptotically. Theft and murder are also ways of playing the game, and nevertheless authorities must be constructed in order to deter and punish them.
As Federalist #51 put it,
Rand admits that she is a romantic. It is great to be an idealist, but reality is busy existing all around the illusion in our fiery minds. There is far more to be said about humans that "self is good; altruism is bad".
But back to the concrete world of The Fountainhead. There were a couple of things that I found dissatisfying about the plot in The Fountainhead. There is the issue of Roark raping Dominique in the beginning of the second book that is disturbing and inconsistent with Roark's principles; he has subjected another person to his will violently. As Rand holds Roark to be the ideal man, I hope that she did not really believe ideal men should go around raping whoever strikes their fancy. Did Dominique want and enjoy it? She seems to have, but she did not give her consent. We must recognize that even ideal people will not always share a sexual attraction for each other, thus leading to the friction of unrequited love and lust. This is inescapable friction in the conflicting interests of humans. I just don't buy this rape as consistent with Roark as the ideal man, and it really bothers me. Rand attempts to escape this in the Atlas Shrugged, asserting "there are no conflicts of interests between rational men." This is absurd; the world possesses nevertheless limited resources (sexual mates in particular) and the human propensity for envy is inescapable. Are we to believe that a rational man must rise to be a Pygmalion?
Secondly, Roark does not bother to defend himself at the first (Stoddard) trial. He doesn't ask any questions of the witnesses, challenge their statements, or even offer any rational arguments in his own defense. He didn't even offer the terms of the contract or the facts. He didn't even make an effort, but instead was completely indifferent. As high as Rand holds reason, Roark doesn't much honor the truth if he is unwilling to even bother countering his accuser's claims with it. This is nevertheless holding Roark's disposition higher than the objective reality in which he exists; his right to indifference therefore occupies a more exalted place than the actuality of the world in which he lives. This amounts to man worship--but whither reason in the face of any type of worship? Rand claimed she absolutely believes in an objective reality, but Roark is so indifferent to other people that he doesn't even bother defending himself with it. He is more important than reality. And his indifference has costs: his financial liability. Roark therefore allows other people to take from him, but he chooses not to defend himself; not even with the truth. This is a bit of an inconsistency that is perhaps corrected in Atlas Shrugged, as John Galt is true to his principles, choosing never to surrender the secret of the motor to those who take by force.
Rand's skill as a novelist is not phenomenal, though we must recognize that her wooden and frankly flat characters are vehicles to a philosophical discourse. There are numerous events that do not advance the story nearly as much as their length would justify in both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and this nevertheless retards the principal messages in each. On the other hand, this psychological ballast gives enough static inertia to the novel so as it make it hard to dismiss with a flick of the wrist, or as the mad ravings of some fascist. Weighing in at some 600,000 words (nearly twice that of the Fountainhead), Atlas Shrugged is truly a behemoth of literature. This weight of course denies reductionism and summarization; it also opens the door to discussing things in far greater depth than a mere pamphlet or novella, allowing a theme to be explored in many situations and illustrate its spreading influence. The scope is surprising, and after reading this book I have been amazed at how deep and in how many areas her ideas apply to the world we live in now--how naked is the collectivist bent to certain political philosophies that hides only under obscurity.
At some point I will explore the collectivism underlying the Open Source movement, but that is an essay for another time.
These are daring books. The Fountainhead deftly and expertly puts its finger directly on the issue; it focuses the lens of debate so that we can see clearly now the stark line that has been distorted and blurred by so many confusing voices. Rand was not the first to identify the primary source of political friction, but through her fiction she has given us one of the most clear illustrations of the matter: the individual versus the collective.
The Fountainhead, as nearly all of Rand's writing, condemns the collective--that feeling of altruism that some use to impel others to self-sacrifice and instill them with guilt. That guilt is just a tool to power and the satisfaction of a parasitic greed and envy, the real dark psychological force underlying communism which masquerades as selflessness. Both books extol the primacy of the individual; the source of creativity, inspiration. Rand holds that the majesty of a reasoning mind belongs solely to an individual and that there is no such thing as a group mind. She dares to let man out from under the punishment of hatred and condemnation espoused by every religion and societal construction of man since the beginning of time, without the temptation to supply a god.
The Fountainhead primarily concentrates on the creativity of Howard Roark and his anti-pole, the power-seeking second-hander Toohey who lacks (or disavows) his own ability and seeks to gain power through subjugating that which he could never be--namely, the creator. Atlas Shrugged focuses more on the broader effect of the Prime Movers, individuals of tremendous inventive and motive power: Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco D'Anconia, Ellis Wyatt, Ken Dannager, and at the pinnacle, the stratospheric John Galt. While Roark experiences ridicule and scorn, even to the point of ruin, but escapes, these giants of Atlas Shrugged are persecuted to the point of destruction, having been impelled to guilt and forced to supply their genius to the world for the benefit of the masses. Ultimately Galt discovers the game and refuses to supply his genius and energy to the world of the looters, pulling the Prime Movers one by one in protest from the looters' grasp, stopping the motor of the world.
The Fountainhead, being written first, is missing the crucial relation of the creator to the rest of the world. The follow-on which overshadows it, Atlas Shrugged, supplies much of the missing material, but there are fundemental assumptions about human nature that I take issue with.
In Atlas Shrugged, the struggle for survival is addressed, though it primarily ignores the violence of human nature until the descent into chaos at the end. These things are not present in the Fountainhead; Rand dismisses them with a flick of the wrist. These are absolutely essential parts of existence in nature, from the smallest and weakest passive plant to the fiercest predator, all along the food chain. The struggle for life--and survival--is the pain and destruction and torture of violence, competition, predation. This an absolutely essential part of humanity's existence and cannot lightly be dismissed as does Rand. The characters in the Fountainhead are not violent; there isn't physical abuse, murder, and destruction, but mostly intellectual and psychological deceit on the part of the collectivists. This ignores an important impulse inherent in human nature. Rand's view of man as heroic and rational I regard not as its natural state, but a state to strive after. She assumes, wrongly, that this pinnacle is the natural state and that the creep of evil, collectivism, is primarily responsible for our inability to reach that height of rationalism and pride. Alas, but human nature is flawed.
The Fountainhead is remarkable but incomplete. Though Atlas Shrugged is needed to complete the story, in the Fountainhead, she does not fully address the question: what can be done against collectivists? Retreat from them, shun them. Be self-sufficient and refuse to let them take what they can. Howard Roark does this in the Fountainhead. But it is not enough when the collectivists are prepared to use force to take from you what they demand. Aggression is not something that can be reasoned with or escaped. It demands growing concessions that cannot be satisfied. It is a force of nature of ever-growing hunger and power; living your own life in a self-sufficient manner (as is done in Atlas Shrugged in the mystical land of Atlantis) is not enough. There is evil beyond that of the passive-aggressiveness of the collective; there is aggression and murder in man's very spirit; it is freely chosen, and it cannot be denied as the Fountainhead does. It must be fought; on the individual level and on a larger scale. Sometimes this struggle becomes a hot war.
We must recognized that it is not possible to shield yourself with an impenetrable barrier; an island, a fortress that can withstand the siege of aggression, nor escape like those in Atlas Shrugged. Every fortress has a weak point or can be overrun and crushed. No shield and no armor can protect against all arrows and swords. A man has a hard skull to protect his soft brain, to protect his fragile logic and reason from the scorching wind, searing heat, and eroding sands of open exposure, but it cannot withstand a direct blow from an aggressor armed with steel. No helmet and no protection is enough. Survival depends not on being armored, or being quick enough to escape and abandon one's possessions and life's work; but by being able to wield weapons in defense, even preemption. To strike an enemy before he can strike you. Kill or be killed. The fundamental struggle of existence. We can see those pacifist forms of life are vegetables, pasture animals--sitting on their hands waiting for slaughter for fear to tarnish their souls with guilt. But those highly developed, those strong, swift, powerful, and even beautiful creatures, be they insect, bird, snake, or mammal, cannot wait to be slaughtered by some greater predator, but fight for survival. Those animals can strike first--kill first--when presented a with a threat. In Rand's philosophical work, she regards it immoral for any man to initiate to the use of force. Is preemption ever moral? For survival we must recognize it may at times be essential, but is it ever moral? Rand must answer in the negative. But how can survival be immoral? Ah, a conundrum is born. But more on that some other time.
We have been taught, and we believe after thousands of years of civilization, that man is placed atop the food chain because man has been given intellect, or alternatively, conscience; because man has evolved a large brain and a large heart--emotions, the ability to communicate and cooperate. But this is only partially so. It also is because we can wield weapons and can plan to avert impending doom, though it not be immediate; we can subvert, deflect, weaken, and destroy the forces of man and nature that would destroy us before they become imminent. From the first wooden club to today's antibiotics; we live on to develop higher because of our willingness to kill first.
This is an inescapable part of our existence as humans. It is not a question of morality, but of reality, and our guilt over our existence--our survival in the face of aggression--is our own making; it is a psychological consequence of our neurological ability to see ourselves in other's places, to imagine suffering how they suffer, and to feel remorse.
All of these forces are mixed in humanity's complex nature. It is not an external force, forbidden knowledge, or a perversion. The nature of life is to kill, consume, and compete without apology in order to survive. It is not solely human nature, it is nature. No creator need put sin in our hearts, nor evil be chosen by Eve, no fall from grace; it is bred into our genes, from the first bacteria. Kill or be killed. No societal norms or conventions or social constructions or imposed morality will ever correct the inherent will to survive that is a part of humanity, arising out of our evolution, and continued existence, as sophisticated predators. This predatory nature insures there will never be a utopia, no matter how far technology develops or our thinking progresses. The utopia that Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged, while theoretically pure and self-consistent, is impossible with the unalterable nature of life.
In Rand's Atlantis there is no government, only individuals trading towards their own self interest, with each trade bringing mutual benefit to the involved parties. This is the purity of capitalism that is unassailable, but it is the ideal that can only be approached asymptotically. Theft and murder are also ways of playing the game, and nevertheless authorities must be constructed in order to deter and punish them.
As Federalist #51 put it,
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to government men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Rand admits that she is a romantic. It is great to be an idealist, but reality is busy existing all around the illusion in our fiery minds. There is far more to be said about humans that "self is good; altruism is bad".
But back to the concrete world of The Fountainhead. There were a couple of things that I found dissatisfying about the plot in The Fountainhead. There is the issue of Roark raping Dominique in the beginning of the second book that is disturbing and inconsistent with Roark's principles; he has subjected another person to his will violently. As Rand holds Roark to be the ideal man, I hope that she did not really believe ideal men should go around raping whoever strikes their fancy. Did Dominique want and enjoy it? She seems to have, but she did not give her consent. We must recognize that even ideal people will not always share a sexual attraction for each other, thus leading to the friction of unrequited love and lust. This is inescapable friction in the conflicting interests of humans. I just don't buy this rape as consistent with Roark as the ideal man, and it really bothers me. Rand attempts to escape this in the Atlas Shrugged, asserting "there are no conflicts of interests between rational men." This is absurd; the world possesses nevertheless limited resources (sexual mates in particular) and the human propensity for envy is inescapable. Are we to believe that a rational man must rise to be a Pygmalion?
Secondly, Roark does not bother to defend himself at the first (Stoddard) trial. He doesn't ask any questions of the witnesses, challenge their statements, or even offer any rational arguments in his own defense. He didn't even offer the terms of the contract or the facts. He didn't even make an effort, but instead was completely indifferent. As high as Rand holds reason, Roark doesn't much honor the truth if he is unwilling to even bother countering his accuser's claims with it. This is nevertheless holding Roark's disposition higher than the objective reality in which he exists; his right to indifference therefore occupies a more exalted place than the actuality of the world in which he lives. This amounts to man worship--but whither reason in the face of any type of worship? Rand claimed she absolutely believes in an objective reality, but Roark is so indifferent to other people that he doesn't even bother defending himself with it. He is more important than reality. And his indifference has costs: his financial liability. Roark therefore allows other people to take from him, but he chooses not to defend himself; not even with the truth. This is a bit of an inconsistency that is perhaps corrected in Atlas Shrugged, as John Galt is true to his principles, choosing never to surrender the secret of the motor to those who take by force.
Rand's skill as a novelist is not phenomenal, though we must recognize that her wooden and frankly flat characters are vehicles to a philosophical discourse. There are numerous events that do not advance the story nearly as much as their length would justify in both the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and this nevertheless retards the principal messages in each. On the other hand, this psychological ballast gives enough static inertia to the novel so as it make it hard to dismiss with a flick of the wrist, or as the mad ravings of some fascist. Weighing in at some 600,000 words (nearly twice that of the Fountainhead), Atlas Shrugged is truly a behemoth of literature. This weight of course denies reductionism and summarization; it also opens the door to discussing things in far greater depth than a mere pamphlet or novella, allowing a theme to be explored in many situations and illustrate its spreading influence. The scope is surprising, and after reading this book I have been amazed at how deep and in how many areas her ideas apply to the world we live in now--how naked is the collectivist bent to certain political philosophies that hides only under obscurity.
At some point I will explore the collectivism underlying the Open Source movement, but that is an essay for another time.
posted by D. Vision at
5:53 PM
3 Comments:
First, you are to be commended for successfully plowing through these books. Rand is an author in desperate love with her own voice.
There is a lot I agree with in Objectivism, but the impulse to charity is as basic to human nature as self-interest, just as flow and ebb are both integral to the tides.
Rand's philosophical moorings are weakened by failing to account for the need (and I would say duty) for humans to look out for one another.
I am not a collectivist by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I care to have the government sned a guy with handcuffs around to collect tac=xes for incredibly ineffective charitable programs. Still, such acts need to be partof the culture, if not enforced by the government.
By
Tim McNabb, at 10:02 PM
Hi Tim,
I think Rand's philosophy is a victim of that academic tendency towards purity; in the mathematical sense, the most basic and simple system might be wonderfully beautiful, complete, and consistent, but nevertheless too simple to fit reality (e.g. Newtonian physics). Human nature is also far too complicated to be reduced to mathematical principles (as Rand does in her nonfiction), but the exploration and development of philosophy and morality through reason can be lucrative.
I agree with your sentiment in that the government should not tax at the point of the gun to support ineffective charity and entitlement programs. I think that charity and community support should always be personal first, local by nature, and always predicated on positive consent (rather than the option to not participate).
I think the "creep of need" and the lack of any meaningful debate about what really is the role of government is mainly to blame for the expansion of the state in the past fifty years.
I don't want to underplay Rand's contribution to the debate. She, more than almost anyone else in the period, articulated the conservative position, emanating from natural rights and using reason to apply them to our world; a vigorous defense of capitalism and an embodiment of all its best principles. She argued successfully that conservatism need not rest on bigotry, hatred, or even God (she and her characters are all atheists)--but rather the core message of conservatism is not domination or fascism but is extraordinarily positive.
I am actually very glad that I have read her work; she's provided conservatives with a picture of a world that nevertheless gives us tools to counter, effectively, that leftist worldview that has so thoroughly infected the world.
By
D. Vision, at 9:21 AM
Atlas Shrugged was given the number two spot of the most influential books of the 20th century, next to the bible.
It's a powerful read and satisfied my mind in the most suffocating way.
As for your confusion surrounding the rape of Dominique by Howard Roark - pick up a copy of My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden - sheds more light on the way Ms. Rand viewed the relationship between a man and woman of the same moral code.
By
Lily, at 9:20 PM
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