Bad Art, Bad Ideas: A Plea to Avoid Seeing Atlas Shrugged

By John Creech

[The following is post from Friday, April 15th from the Center for the American Republic Blog] With today's release of the film of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, its appropriate to consider some of the reasons Bentley Hart gives us in his article "The Trouble with Ayn Rand" (found in the 2011 May edition of First Things) as to why we should avoid seeing this film.  It's especially important to consider these reasons given the recent attention Rand's work has received in conservative circles.  The trailer of the movie was not only unveiled at this year's CPAC convention, for example, but Rand's works are showing up at Tea Party rallies, and have been recommended by some "conservative" talk-show hosts, Glenn Beck, among them.  

Generally, Hart argues, we should avoid contributing to the potential success of this movie, not only because the novel, Atlas Shrugged, is bad art, but because its message has the potential for poisoning our souls and constitutes yet another nail in the coffin of Western civilization.  Besides, there's another movie, according to Hart, we should see instead, one that promises to be more artistically beautiful as well as philosophically profound.   

Following are some of Hart's criticisms of the art and philosophy of Atlas Shrugged:

As for Rand's artistic ability, Hart reviews a number of selections from her novels and concludes: For what really puts both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are.  I know one shouldn't expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare.  Even so the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance -- it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect:  at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.  [Visit the Center for the American Republic Blog to continue reading the article]. 

On the Road: With Rand & The Randroids

By Susanne Creamcheese, TIC’s Roving Pop-Culture Correspondent

Hackensack, NJ – American campuses are hot to trot for the new pop band, Rand and the Randroids, on tour promoting their first album, “Waterheads.” Guys, how did you come up with the concept for the album?

Rand: There’s, like, this dead chick named Rand. Just like me except she’s, you know, dead. And she wrote a book or maybe a blog entry called “Waterhead.” It might have been a book.

Joey Delvecchio (drummer): Isn’t it called “The Fountainhead?”

Rand: Whatever. We only learned that after the album-cover went to the printers. It’s about an architecture student who flunks out of school, so our audiences can relate to him. But he thinks he’s a genius and doesn’t need education and his buildings won’t fall down or anything. Way cool.

Ayn Rand Shrugged: Why Bother?

by Winston Elliott III

In comments on a post on The Imaginative Conservative (Whittaker Chambers and the Strenuously Sterile World of Atlas Shrugged) the question has been raised as to the value of discussing Ayn Rand and her teachings on a site dedicated to conservative thought. Below, in brief, is my thinking on why this discussion is worthwhile.
 
Ayn Rand's philosophy of selfishness, materialism and denial of the created nature of the human person continues its pernicious mischief fifty-four years after Whittaker Chambers' (1957, National Review) powerfully condemning review of Atlas Shrugged. So what is the conservative to do? To quote Sun Tzu: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete." Simply dismissing her is not enough.

In my youth I tried to follow her philosophy and it took me far from the True, the Good and the Beautiful for almost two decades. Fortunately, I knew just enough of Russell Kirk's books that the seeds were planted for a true conservatism. But, first the Rand weed had to be torn from my mind.

Rand has been dismissed as an inferior intellectual and literary talent yet her influence on young minds remains. These young people, often of conservative inclination, are seeking a muscular presentation of the purpose of human life. Nothing less than a bold conservatism anchored in the best of Western, dare I say, Christian tradition will suffice.

I recently had the opportunity to speak at a conservative Christian college to seventy or so of their brightest students. When I finished my talk of thirty minutes, which ranged from Russell Kirk to Will Durant, from ancient Rome to the dimming liberal arts tradition in today's academy, I took numerous questions from the students. More than half of the questions were regarding Ms. Rand. This even though my mention of my experience with her philosophy was less than five minutes of my lecture.

It seems that among these young people were "recovering Randians" who wanted to know what to read to further their recovery. A few had "Randian" friends that they wished to persuasively offer the Truth of Faith. Also, there were students who wanted to know why today's "conservative" talk show hosts keep recommending Rand's books when her philosophy is incompatible with conservative principles.

The new movie version of Atlas Shrugged will most likely bring an increased interest in her destructive "Objectivism." While I would rather discuss greater thinkers, it is worthy of our time to offer a principled conservative tradition, rooted in Christian faith, as an alternative to the "Virtue of Selfishness" Ms. Rand offers to another generation of young people. For they are really seeking understanding and Truth (even if they don't know it.)

I am grateful to the always brilliant Stephen Masty for his very clever comment on this topic:

We have all been exposed to the so-called Randroid Virus (identified by pathologists at The Mecosta Laboratory for Bacteriological and Viral Ideology as Libertariensis Boobus Objectivus, Type R). Then our conservative antibodies rejected it immediately, or (with G2 therapy, God's Grace) our culturo-philosophical auto-immune systems built up resistance over time. Either way, now we are safe. Not so for the young (apart from those souls fortunate enough to hear you live on campus tours). To ignore the peril would be, as you imply, to abandon America's youth to a particularly communicable and pernicious strain of ideo-pathogen and the metastasizing, psycho-cultural mutations that often follow infection. This much is simple science.

What is needed desperately is a vaccine such as Dr. Jonas Salk's 1952 polio treatment. Nowadays administered on a tasty sugar cube, a similarly pleasant and painless delivery system for any ideocide must be an integral part of pharma-cultural design if we wish to eradicate this or any ideo-endemic disease. Without going deep into the bio-chemistry, like any vaccine it must prime the recipient's conservative auto-immune system with an immunogen, an infectious agent that mimics (safely) the dangerous virus, so that the patient's own body can recognise and eliminate the targeted ideo-pathogen. So far, modern conservative science understands the religio-molecular structure of an optimal ideo-immunogen but not the ideal delivery system for which the most effective media may be media (print or broadcast: see Leubsdorfer, Die Biologisch Mechanismus der Ideologie, Leipzig, 2002). Meanwhile, many top researchers known to this website are working around the clock to generate a conservative, culturally-borne vaccine that can awaken a young patient's/reader's immature defenses against this potentially disabling disease. 

Whittaker Chambers and “the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged”

by John Barnes

Working in the free-market policy world, I’m forced to endure a certain adulation of Ayn Rand and her epic Atlas Shrugged.  With only a couple weeks until the much-awaited film version debuts, the email listerves normally teeming with white papers and legislative analysis are now spitting out adverts telling me to get my tickets now because the day draweth nigh.  It is fitting that these notices and the movie itself appear during Lent, when so many souls are in such need of penitential activities.

In honor of this upcoming film debut, I think it’s fitting here on The Imaginative Conservative to highlight Whittaker Chambers’ timeless and incisive critique of Rand’s pièce de résistance.  It’s worth reading (and remembering).

Big Sister Is Watching You

By Whittaker Chambers

From the Dec. 28, 1957, issue of National Review

Several years ago, Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. It appears to be slowly climbing the best-seller lists.

The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. “This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

Kirk on "The Book"

The following 1950 quote from Russell Kirk [“How Dead is Edmund Burke?,” Queen’s Quarterly 57 (1950): 162] made me think of our recent conversation on the power of Ayn Rand to attract strong, young minds,eager for Truth.

Men of conservative impulse are numerous in every society; they are among us today, but most of them are perplexed for guidance, the popular prophets of this century being advocates of change. Many of them are looking for a conservative’s decalogue—groping in this twilight hour. If ever they find it, it may be in the pages of Burke. Spend some hours in a bookshop frequented by young men, and you will observe that some of them are after The Book—the book which holds the clue to life with principle, particularly social principle. Many have ceased to search, having found Freud or Marx or some other mighty name. But some go on browsing, turning over Spengler or Berdyaev, Ortega and Belloc, dissatisfied. Prejudice, interest, conscience have told this remnant that their Idea resides elsewhere. But where? Not many come upon Burke.

With Both Barrels: First Anne Rice, Now Dinesh D’Souza! Will the defections never cease?

By Brad Birzer

As I was “calling it a day” last night, my good friend, Carl, over at Ignatius Insight Scoop, posted a note about Dinesh D’Souza and his assumption of the presidency of The King’s College.

http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2010/08/puzzling-even-perplexing.html

Before I write anything more, I must admit two things.  

Looking Up From Valhalla: Ayn Rand and the Paganization of the American Right, Part II

Continued. . . .

What finally made me question Rand, though, was an essay she wrote on why an Objectivist would be pro-choice on the abortion issue.  For whatever reason, this hit me as absurd and hypocritical on her part.  It seemed (and still does) to contradict the best of what she believed and promoted.  Again, I was an atheist/agnostic, but I was a free market, pro-life atheist/agnostic/libertarian. . . .  Well, let just say “I existed” as a bundle of contradictions.  But, I existed.  Regardless, even as a whatever, I knew that Rand had contradicted herself on this issue.

As I enter my mid forties, having spent most of my adult life studying the great Christian Humanists of the last two centuries, I’ve come to believe that Rand is as “modern” as it gets.  She just seems to embody right-wing modernism rather than radical or progressive modernism.  Not in terms of her understanding of government, of course, but in her understanding of the human person and the Church, she strikes me as intensely fascistic.  The memoirs of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, her closest associates in the 1950s and early 1960s, bear this out. 

Here’s one example from her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.  “Observe that it [Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, “On the Development of Peoples”] is not aimed at destroying man’s mind, but at a slower, more agonizing equivalent: at enslaving it.” [Rand, Capitalism, pg. 305]

Really?  For centuries, the oldest institution in the West defining and defending the rights of the human person, the church that inspired St. John, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Bede, St. Gregory the Great, John of Salisbury, St. Thomas á Becket, St. Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, St. Robert Bellermine, St. Thomas More, John Henry Newman, and St. Maximilian Kolbe finds its culmination in the dismissal, “at enslaving” man.  Strange, the Catholic Church always held enslavement as illegal, unethical, and immoral.  Did it always follow this belief in practice, no.  But, it’s the language of the Church that ended such evil in the western world.

Looking Up from Valhalla: Ayn Rand and the Paganization of the American Right, Part I

National Review’s cover this week features a very captivating art-deco style rendering of Ayn Rand.  Whether intentional or not (and most likely it is), the portrait divides Rand’s face in manichaen fashion, half light, half dark.  Though the article, “Ayn Rand Reconsidered: A Greatness Stunted by Hate,” by Jason Steorts, is relatively short, it packs a serious punch.  While praising the best of The Fountainhead, Steorts has nothing but contempt for Atlas Shrugged.

There is so much to be said against Rand as an artist. There is the inept dialogue—characters begin a great many sentences by shouting each other’s names … the heroes speak, every one of them, in exactly the same voice; the averagely intelligent advance the plot by blurting out their secrets. There is the Girl Scout banality of Atlas Shrugged’s heroine, who seems to have escaped from the young–adult section. There is the preposterous omnicompetence of the heroes, equally at home on the Harvard faculty or in a Vin Diesel movie, and the endless gushing about their exalted feelings, Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what she has not earned with character development. (NR, August 30, 2010, pg. 48)

From Steorts’s perspective, Rand, who had accomplished much with The Fountainhead (1943) while looking inward to the potential greatness of man, has begun to look outward at mankind with Atlas Shrugged (1957).  Then, she only sees dismal failure.

And, what about Rand’s abilities as a novelist, as an artist, as a creator?