User:Anville/Atlas Shrugged

One Time at Rand Camp: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Acclaim
According to a 1991 survey by the Book of the Month Club (and published via the Library of Congress's Center for the Book), book-club readers recognize Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book for Americans today, after the Bible. In addition, the Boston Public Library has named Atlas Shrugged as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. 

Though impressive at first glance, these poll results should be taken skeptically. Considering the former survey, the Library of Congress web site repots a wide gap between the first and second-place entries. Beyond this, they give no indication of the spacing between any books' standings, only the ranking of one book atop another. Furthermore, the response bias of this survey must be examined; as with all "opportunity sampling", the results cannot be statistically guaranteed to reflect the actual population behavior. The second survey, apparently compiled by a single individual, includes no indication of its selection criteria of the books' relative rankings (they are sorted alphabetically).

Part of the significance of Rand's work can be judged by the breadth of allusions later writers have made to her writings. Atlas Shrugged is a central example of the libertarian science fiction sub-genre; on the other hand, Eric S. Raymond detects a libertarian ideology in science fiction&mdash;particularly "hard SF"&mdash;as early as the 1930s.

Summary of criticisms
However, widespread name recognition does not equate to widespread adulation. "There are more Rand critics than followers," writes noted skeptic Michael Shermer, who is himself partial to Rand's philosophy (save the portions which, he claims, actually lead to irrational and cultish behavior). The following is a summary, representative but not exhaustive, of reasons readers have reacted in this negative, critical fashion.

Force, Atlas Shrugged is above all an ideological novel, whose raison d'être begins and ends in Objectivism. Readers who follow Nabokov in holding "a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss [...] All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster"&mdash;such readers likely find precious little of value in Atlas Shrugged. Those who believe "allegory is an aesthetic mistake" are not certain to find this book appealing.

Criticisms of Objectivism are necessarily criticisms of Atlas Shrugged, though the converse need not be true. For example, the novel's morality appears rooted in pre-Nash, pre-Keynes economics and willfully ignores evidence that unfettered self-interest can harm the individual as well as the group&mdash;e.g., the tragedy of the commons. Indeed, in Rand's world nature exists only as a font of raw materials, with no thought given to sustainability, let alone ecological balance. In earlier years, Thomas Carlyle's wishes for leadership by "strong silent men", his characterization of democracy as "chaos equipped with ballot urns", were taken as precursors to Fascism. They may also serve as epigrams for Atlas Shrugged ' s heroes, and indeed several reviewers have commented on the book's Fascist tones. Whittaker Chambers, one of the first reviewers to examine the book, commented "the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship".

(One might remark here that Godwin's Law indicates future debate will be pointless.)

One may also charge that the fans' claim of the novel refuting Christianity is overblown or pretentious. To a Humanist eye, Atlas Shrugged is only a sequence of words arranged on paper, stemming from one imagination, and as such, it has the same weight refuting Christianity as the Bible has supporting it. In this view, a persuasive rebuke of Christian belief must indicate that the predictions of Christian theology do not match observations. This critique could take several forms: scientific discoveries disproving the cosmology implied by doctrinare Christianity, or that nations embracing Christianity have in fact deteriorated. (The beliefs, in other words, must be measured against life and not against fiction. Here, these points are raised to indicate alternatives that Altas Shrugged does not explore, not to debate theology, a topic which lies outside this article's scope.)  Indeed, though the notion of probing religious belief via empirical observation dates back at least to Maimonides and Aquinas, Objectivism appears to bypass the concept. For all its emphasis on reason, the ideology&mdash;and this novel which is its bastion&mdash;lacks the concept of reformulating hypothesis in accord with changing and uncertain information.

Focusing on this novel in particular, its view of science, technology and innovation has been called simplstic and unrealistic. Atlas Shrugged stays firmly within the mythos of the hero-inventor, "Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that". (In fact, John Galt can be read as an aged Tom Swift character, whose teenage charm has grown into adult sex appeal, and whose technical brilliance has matured into an ability to violate physical law.) A more realistic model of innovation, which hews closer to historical actuality, includes the effect of accidental discoveries, surprise use of one tool in another field, and above all the interaction among inventors. The steam engine did not begin with James Watt, nor electric light with Edison. Or, to balance one SF novel with another published the same year,


 * The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that makes everything else possible. [...] The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. [...] Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

In a related vein, the novel fails to address the way scientists' minds seem to lose flexibility over time, becoming less and less able to produce worthwhile ideas as they age. This is certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, but it has been witnessed enough times that scientists half-jokingly expect it. A popular quatrain, sometimes attributed to Paul Dirac, runs as follows:


 * Age is, of course, a fever chill
 * That every physicist must fear.
 * He's better dead than living still
 * When once he's past his thirtieth year.

With this effect at work, one could expect Galt's Gulch to become an intolerably sterile community&mdash;particularly since Rand steers far away from the issue of children (see, ).

Reviewers have also noted that the specific technologies Rand posits in her fictional world are frequently implausible. Impossibly strong alloys are made from improbably soft metals, and Galt's static-electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Compare the rationale the Wachowski Brothers give for building the Matrix.)

One reason cited for Atlas Shrugged ' s attraction is the same invoked to explain the enduring popularity of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series: nerd appeal. (The irony here is that in the Foundation universe, no political system or ideology can be perfect, and every solution becomes the next generation's problem&mdash;the antithesis of Objectivism. Asimov, it happens, patterned his fictional history upon Edward Gibbon's account of Rome's decay.)  In one reviewer's words, "The book not only preaches that creating new things is an automatic path to riches, but that all other human activities are inessential.  This relegates to trivia such considerations as social skills, etiquette, other people's feelings, any exertion outside of your own narrow focus, and possibly even personal hygiene".

Since so many of these issues hinge upon the novel's ideology, those readers who are already committed Objectivists are likely to overlook what detractors contend are serious flaws. Likewise, to others these flaws appear so inescapable and overwhelming that even applying the word novel to the book devalues the word itself. Whittaker Chambers summarized his feelings in 1957, saying "Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained".

More humorously, satirists have turned their attention to Atlas Shrugged many times, critiquing its style, its didactic message or both. One episode of Matt Groening's television series Futurama features the cast of heroes exploring a subterranean civilization in the sewers beneath 30th century New York City. All the sewer-dwellers' possessions are items flushed from the world above. For example, the public library contains only "crumpled porno and Ayn Rand".

Reviews

 * Review from a self-proclaimed non-Libertarian
 * Review from the Weird Bookshelf ("fine science fiction books").
 * Slade, Robert M. Review from the Internet Review Project (1998).
 * A review which, while attempting to address the environmentalist issues, claims that Atlas Shrugged is a sequel to The Lord of the Rings.

Satires and parodies

 * 10 Steps to Objectivism
 * "Mozart Was a Red"
 * The Abridged Atlas Shrugged
 * Atlas Shr, a look at parallel universes wherein all of Ayn Rand's books are four hundred pages shorter
 * Oscar Shrugged, a depiction of the first film festival held in Galt's Gulch
 * Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later, starring Bob the Angry Flower

Other works cited

 * Asimov, Isaac. The Naked Sun, (Doubleday, 1957), ISBN 9-997-40641-9.
 * Borges, Jorge L. "Two Books", in Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999), ISBN 0-670-84947-2, pp. 207-10;  also the Prologue to Carlyle's On Heroes, pp. 413-18.
 * Borges, Jorge L. "From Allegories to Novels", in Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, 1999), ISBN 0-670-84947-2, pp. 337-40.  See also.
 * Burke, James. Connections (Little, Brown; 1978), ISBN 0-316-11681-5.
 * Chambers, Whittaker. "Big Sister Is Watching You", National Review (28 December 1957), pp. 594-96.
 * "I Second That Emotion", Futurama episode 2ACV01, written by Patrick M. Verrone, directed by Mark Ervin, first aired 21 November 1999.
 * Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776).  Ed. by David Womersley, (Allen Lane, 1994), ISBN 0-713-99124-0.
 * Gleick, James. Genius (Pantheon, 1992), ISBN 0-679-40836-3.
 * Nabokov, Vladimir V. "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Anchor Review (Summer 1956). Reprinted in, e.g., Alfred Appel's The Annotated Lolita, (Vintage, 1991), ISBN 0-679-72729-9.
 * Pynchon, Thomas R. The Crying of Lot 49, (J. B. Lippincott, 1965).
 * Raymond, Eric S. "A Political History of SF" (November 2002).
 * Russell, Bertrand. "Why I Am Not a Christian".
 * Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine, 1996), ISBN 0-345-40946-9.  See also.
 * Shermer, Michael. "The Unlikeliest Cult in History", Skeptic 2 No. 2 (1993): pp. 74-81.  Also printed in Why People Believe Weird Things (W. H. Freeman, 1997), ISBN 0-716-73090-1.
 * Thorburn, David. "Television Melodrama"; in Adler, Adler and Cater eds., Television as a Cultural Force (Praeger, 1976).