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Atlas Shrugged (criticism) (view source)
Revision as of 00:45, September 15, 2010
, 00:45, September 15, 2010→Jason Lee Steorts
== Jason Lee Steorts ==
== Jason Lee Steorts ==
The most recent extended review of ''Atlas Shrugged'', titled "The Greatly Ghastly Rand," appeared in the August 30, 2010 issue of ''National Review'' and in fact came from its managing editor, Jason Lee Steorts.<ref name=Steorts>Steorts JL, "The Greatly Ghastly Rand," ''National Review,'', August 30, 2010, pp. 43-48. <http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244381/greatly-ghastly-rand-jason-lee-steorts></ref> Steorts said that he sought to determine for himself why ''Atlas Shrugged'' remained popular. He drew no definite conclusion, because he concluded that the work is a most unworthy example of the novelist's craft, and indeed could not be more offensive had Rand deliberately intended to insult all who disagreed with her.
He begins with his most strenuous single objection to the work: Rand's treatment of the passengers of the ill-fated Comet in the [[Taggart Tunnel]] disaster. He confirms that when Whittaker Chambers famously accused Rand of saying,{{cquote|To a gas chamber—go!}}that Rand was talking specifically about a group of three hundred people who died in a mass transportation disaster. In no account of such a disaster in real life—whether it was the sinking of RMS ''[[Titanic]]'', the destruction of the two Boeing 747 airliners in a runway collision at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, or any of a number of commercial-aviation accidents—has anyone suggested that the casualties of that disaster deserved what they got. (The obvious exception is a [[terrorist]] strike, which is an act of mass [[murder]] after which the murderers typically blame their victims.) Yet Rand names fourteen specific examples of passengers that committed some [[sin]] or other against individual freedom, declared that everyone aboard the train "share[d] one or more of these ideas," and then cut to the scene with [[Dagny Taggart]] and [[Francisco d'Anconia]], at the end of which a breathless radio announcer gives the details of the disaster. The outraged Steorts declared that he could read no further.
Steorts' objection is this: Rand has ably demonstrated, up to the offending passage, the chain of carelessness, venality, and cynicism that led multiple railroad employees and supervisors, any one of which should have known better, to cause a passenger train to enter an eight-mile tunnel with a coal-burning steam locomotive to pull it. Yet, in the end, Rand ''blames the passengers themselves'' for, in effect, creating the climate that put such cynical operators into key positions of management. That, he says, is a symptom of a larger problem: that ''Atlas Shrugged'' is a grand exercise in misanthropy.
Steorts then sets up a contrast between this novel and Rand's earlier work, ''[[The Fountainhead]].'' The hero of that work, architect Howard Roark, is in many respects just as flawed a protagonist as [[John Galt]] is, the flaw being that neither man shows any real emotion. In John Galt, this is excusable: he is not a hero, but an anti-villain, and thus allowed to be one-dimensional and single-minded. But Steorts objects even more to something that he finds glaringly lacking: ''the anti-villains have no worthy adversary.'' All of the villains of the work are absurdly incompetent at what they do, and seem incapable of building a truly fearsome security apparatus. Roark did have a worthy adversary in architectural critic Ellsworth Monkton Toohey. ''Atlas Shrugged'' has no Toohey—nor a [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]], nor a [[Vladimir I. Lenin|Lenin]], nor a [[Josef Stalin|Stalin]], nor a [[Mao Zedong|Mao]]. Steorts had a point, but never read far enough to recognize it: [[Mr. Thompson]] is a very poor substitute for a national dictator. His pretense at dictatorship, at the demonstration of [[Project X]], is as close as he comes—but in the end, Thompson abdicates his powers and leaves everything to the closest thing to a truly evil person: [[Floyd Ferris]], associate director of the [[State Science Institute]].
Steorts fails, however, to observe that real life has vindicated Rand in two respects. For one thing, a true hero often does ''not'' always have a worthy adversary, and the enemies of freedom rarely rise to the frightening competency and efficiency of a Hitler or a Stalin or arguably a Mao. For another, the American electorate elected a modern-day Mr. Thompson in 2008; his name is [[Barack Obama]]. Advocates of freedom, including the [[Tea Party Movement]], have accused Obama of many things, but competency is not something that most of his critics have attributed to him. ([[Glenn Beck]] may believe that Obama is deliberately destroying the American economy in order to excuse his promulgation of a [[Directive 10-289]], but some of Beck's pronouncements indicate that Beck believes that Obama well and truly believes his own pronouncements and thus is more tragic than villainous.)
Perhaps Steorts would have like ''Atlas Shrugged'' better if it had had a [[George Soros]] type—a financier who made his money by currency arbitrage and was the real political mover behind [[Mr. Thompson]], [[Wesley Mouch]], [[Floyd Ferris]], and some of the other villains. But Rand never believed that conspiracies of evil men were or could be held responsible for society's ills, and would certainly accuse Steorts of running out of ideas and preferring to fight men instead. Rand would say, as she did in fact say in a number of other essays, that the real villain in the piece was someone who was long since dead: [[Immanuel Kant]], who with [[Friederich Hegel]] was the primary influence on the philosophical thinking of the usually credited (or blamed) father of [[communism]], [[Karl Marx]]. How does one craft a novel setting up a ''dead man'' as the uber-adversary? Well, one doesn't.
Steorts raises one valid point—that disaster victims cannot be said to have brought disaster upon themselves, except perhaps by not thinking their ideas through. (That, and that at least one of the anti-villains, namely D'Anconia, behaves with unreasonable and often unfocused anger toward some who cross his path, an anger that John Galt and even [[Ragnar Danneskjold]] are better able to manage). But his other points are much harder to justify, especially since he, unlike Chambers, has the benefit of direct observation of a modern-day scenario that is imitating Rand's work in the most uncanny manner imaginable.
== The Ayn Rand Center ==
== The Ayn Rand Center ==