Atlas Shrugged - Review + Musings on Postmodernism

A little while ago, I—taking inspiration from Tracingwoodgrains—asked if I should read Atlas Shrugged. I’ve obviously known about the book for years and even had the privilege(?) of watching both the 2011 and 2012 live-action movie adaptations with a conservative family friend1. I grew up in an extremely literary family—both my parents were literature PhD students, after all—but Atlas Shrugged wasn’t the type of book I was likely to encounter as a child, simply because a diatribe in favor of human greed wasn’t part of my parents’ taste function.

The overwhelming majority of people who responded urged me to read the book—so I did. I had, years ago, tried to begin The Fountainhead and bounced off. But this isn’t the first time I’ve come back to a book, or author, after being recommended by people I trust. For example, a fellow PhD and close friend challenged my perspective on Nietzsche2 and claimed it was, in fact, “life affirming.” On a second pass, where previously I had seen nothing but madness, I now saw imperfect hints of real profundity. I haven’t become a Nietzschean—anymore than I am a Christian—but I’m much more sympathetic to those who are.

So I read Atlas Shrugged. My biases going in were the a priori biases that just exist among all people of the social class that is expected to have some opinion, even if you are not expected to have read the material itself. One, Objectivism was not a real philosophy—aka it had huge holes. Two, Ayn Rand was a bad writer. And three, the villains would be cartoonishly evil and the heroes would be cartoonishly good. Having read the book, I’m not sure I think any of these actually hold water.

The headline is that I would give this book an 8/10. It is pretty good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a palate cleanser. You get the book’s point pretty early, and I think you could honestly set it down whenever and miss very little. “People, not systems, are the highest ethical judge”. The morality presented is odd and I would argue incomplete3, but it is sincere and honest.

But I also want to yap about modern society and postmodernism4—two of my favorite subjects. So I’ll do that. Basically, I think that postmodernism presented a very solid critique of society—morality is complicated and often leads to weird contradictions—but then got scared by the implications of it and so imposed a meta-meta-narrative on our cultural understanding of ourselves. This is totally arbitrary, and at any moment, as a society, we can just become 10% more honest. Hypocrisy is bad but inevitable, and it is a job for each batch of Americans to iteratively improve this collective project. So in that vein, I’m going to touch on each of the “prestige” criticisms of the book and reflect on why I think they exist, as well as share some further ponderings on postmodernism.

Objectivism

Look, I don’t see what makes something a real or not real philosophy. I’ve never actually taken a philosophy class and find academic wordsmithing tiresome. But Objectivism seems to be a totally fine philosophy in the sense that I feel like I have a pretty firm idea of what it would look like to live in that society—either in Ayn Rand’s own words or in the negative form of the game Bioshock.

I think there are a lot of truths that aren’t able to be picked up in the system, but alas, isn’t this the doomed world of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem5? I’m not going to really hammer at this. Obviously people don’t like philosophies they disagree with, and in retrospect I probably should have been—and should learn to be in general—less confident in social condemnation of a system of belief.

The Characters(and Post Modernism)

Here are my high-level thoughts.

Dagny is awesome. Trains are much cooler than I had thought they would be. Train futurism anybody? I’m not sure why I doubted; I love setting up train lines in Factorio. Moving material around is badass and appeals to something deep in my mind I can’t really explain. The sex scenes are awkward, but I’m not sure how much of that is just me being a dude. For some context, to the people who haven’t read the book, the sex scenes are very rapey in a way I imagine a book like Fifty Shades of Grey is. Also, my lord, Ayn Rand can yap at times—more on this later.

The other characters are also a little cartoonish. But I feel like the best way to understand this book is as a mirror to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. What do I mean by this? Well, I think both books just bleed sincerity. Invisible Man follows a young Black man who wants to be an upstanding member of society and is met with cartoonishly evil and incompetent characters. In contrast, Atlas Shrugged follows a highly competent and driven woman who wants to be left alone to improve the world and express herself but is met with cartoonishly evil and incompetent characters.

But in both cases, none of this feels invented. Ralph Ellison was a Black man born in the South during the nadir of US race relations, and Ayn Rand was a bourgeois Jew born on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Their worlds, when they wrote their respective books, were cartoonishly evil and unfair. We have a certain American centrist view of atrocities, but it is worth remembering that bourgeois Jews born in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century are in the running for the most systematically abused groups of people in human history.

If, to Ralph Ellison, the enemy was the overt racism of the South and the masked, smiling racism of the North, then Rand’s was the totalitarian “kindness” of Soviet Socialism. Her villains represent the clawing resentment and incompetence that led to the Holodomor and the specific targeting of the most productive and law-abiding members of society—the Kulaks—within Ayn Rand’s own lifetime.

So then why is Invisible Man a classic of the Western literary canon—at least the prestige canon—but Atlas Shrugged is not, especially since one is still enormously popular and the other appears to have drifted into obscurity? Because our cultural tastemakers are sympathetic to the plight of Ralph Ellison but they are not to the plight of Ayn Rand.

If, after reading the writings of Ellison, I went: “Well, what are you going to do? America needed to abuse the Blacks in order to construct the powerful modern society we have,” people would, rightfully, think I was insane—even evil. But I sort of get the feeling that this is what people do to Ayn Rand—if not so explicitly, then through implication. Again, I want to emphasize, I’m not comparing a White guy attending a lecture with Jim Crow. No, I’m comparing the lived experience of a Russian bourgeois Jew born in 1905 with a Black man born in 1914.

So what does any of this have to do with postmodernism? That requires me to explain what I think the major theme of postmodernism is. I would argue that the basic connecting premise of all postmodern culture is that of perspective. By this I mean that morality, history, etc., can only ever be understood through the lens of perspective. The inklings of this idea have always existed—there is nothing new under the sun—but it went into overdrive after the end of WWII in the West and is now a global phenomenon. Part of the reason it is so powerful is that it is basically true. Take Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an example. No one disputes the primary sources for that book, nor have there really been additional discoveries of Roman texts that change the basic pile of evidence. Instead, we have turned a moral critical eye on the source material. In certain cases, this is probably productive—such as the reexamination of Caesar or early Christianity—but in others, I think it is basically destructive—such as in the case of Caligula or Nero.

But there is a second thread to this idea of perspective: reality cannot be viewed as having some ultimate moral truth. The idea of ultimate moral truth or ultimate anything is often referred to as a “metanarrative” and its rejection is central to postmodernism. Of course none of this means that there cannot be “particular” truths like those in any stories and if anything postmodernism strives to lift these voices up - in theory.

I feel like critics—who wield huge influence—have this asymmetric expectation of certain types of writers or perspectives. Going back to Ayn Rand and Ralph Ellison: in one, the characters are unrepresentative, and in the other, they are motifs of real people. If I was making a movie about ancient China and I cast half of the characters as non–East Asian people, eyebrows would be raised. Let alone if I was doing something like making a movie about the Antebellum South and I made most—or even just some—of the slaves seen in the movie White. In certain circumstances, we hold up the obscure, and in others, we use its obscurity as a tool to silence it.

Let me give an example of what I mean. If you look at the authors who have won Nobel Prizes over the last 20 or so years, they are almost all focused on living as a marginalized person within the brutalities of capitalism. That is an experience that millions of people have. But why does Ayn Rand have to include their perspective any more than Ralph Ellison would have to include the perspective of a White grandmother who was mugged and beaten up by Black migrants from the South? Unless you think that certain perspectives—if not morals—are allowable and others should just not be mentioned—ever.

In many ways postmodernism is just “a little life”-ism. The only stories that are acceptable are those that speak to either the experiences, or fantasies of the New Left.

Just look at the 2019 Joker. That movie resonated with people because it matched their experiences. You can say stuff like “Well, on average, White guys have a better life than minority women,” or “Young men on average don’t face problems like the Joker,” but what are we doing here? No one is calling up Hanya Yanagihara to say, “Look, on average, people aren’t disabled gay men who are sexually abused by priests. Why would you write about this?” A far larger number of men have had experiences like those of the Joker than have had experiences like Jude from A Little Life. When we say a story isn’t authentic but millions of people resonated with it, we are being egotists. We can say we didn’t resonate with it, but the entire point of postmodernism is we don’t get to determine what is authentic and what isn’t. Yet when they made the second Joker movie, they decided to lampoon him and scold the fans to the tune of a couple hundred million dollars.

I really want to hammer this home. In modern media, we center extraordinarily unusual people. If you see a story about a Black person in London during WWII, it is worth realizing that less than 0.1% of the city’s population would have been Black at the time. By contrast a show about the racial collapse of the Bronx or Detroit in the 1970s is inconceivable. Not because the story is less “real” as in it didn’t happen but because it would be chewed up and destroyed by the prestige tastemakers. Postmodernism has not resulted in a deconstruction of the metanarrative as it seemed to want to do but instead in the imposition of a much more stifling meta-meta-narrative that has swallowed our entire media landscape.

If I can leave this section with a final thought: the expansion of our intellectual lives to care about the perspective of the storyteller is good. People who want to go back to modernism are idiots who can’t do it even if they want to. But we should keep expanding the scope of allowable stories so that they better reflect our actual experience as humans, not just the experiences certain members of our society. We each experience some tiny fraction of reality, and I just appreciate people who sincerely communicate theirs. I expect nothing more or less from an artist.

Writing

The third assumption that I had was that the writing would be bad. So perhaps it is because I’m listening to an audiobook form of the book, but honestly, the writing isn’t bad at all. Is Ayn Rand the greatest prose writer of all time? No, that would be Cormac McCarthy, in my opinion. But is she even in the bottom 80%? Also no.

This has bothered me more than the characters, since I expect people to be offended by representations of life that they dislike—I don’t think anyone lives up to the metamodernist ideal—but prose shouldn’t be that divisive. I will say the book is way too long and the author needed a much more aggressive editor. Huge amounts of the material—over half, I would argue—could be cut away and you would lose little. But the complaints I see in reviews aren’t usually about the length. Instead, they tend to be mostly about the style, which I thought was fine. Photocopies of photocopies, as they like to say.

Now, if I were going to describe the writing style of this book, it is an anti–Infinite Jest. If Infinite Jest is a book that is supposed to be confusing and unclear—to the point I’m not sure anyone even really knows what it is about—Atlas Shrugged is supposed to be blindly clear. In fact, the author takes an extended period of time to tell you exactly what she meant in the form of a radio broadcast at the end. But it is anti–Infinite Jest also because where everyone claims to love Infinite Jest’s writing, everyone seems to hate Atlas Shrugged. This isn’t an attack on DFW; he is probably the author whose vision of life is closest to mine, but fuck, that guy needed an editor, badly. I feel bad for DFW since he emerged in an era of deconstruction, and he clearly hated it. He wanted sincerity and clarity but was only taught irony and confusion. He gets a pass because he is so brilliant in what he is actually saying. But the fact that the book is hard to understand is bad. Being confusing is not a sign of being a high-quality writer—in fact, the extreme opposite. I feel similarly about Nietzsche and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. That book is beautiful enough that it gets a pass, similar to DFW, but come on, y’all. Are we going to pretend it is communicable?

In short, if you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, I would recommend you read it. I would recommend you treat it like any perspective: incomplete, flawed, and beautiful. I would also recommend you come in with an open mind and don’t try to pick fights with the author. There is a lot here for someone who wants to look for it.