The Invalid Identification of Contraries With Contradictories
VITAL WORKS RECONSIDERED, #32
By Donald DeMarco | January-February 2013
Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum (www.truthandcharityforum.org).
Atlas Shrugged. By Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, might be the most perplexing and infuriating novel ever written. Its publication in 1957 was met with a tirade of scathing reviews from literary critics of diverse temperaments. On the Left, Gore Vidal described its philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” On the Right, former communist Whittaker Chambers, writing in National Review, said he found it “sophomoric” and “remarkably silly.” “Out of a lifetime of reading,” he wrote, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.” Ruth Chapin Blackmun saw it as a “polemic inadequately disguised as a novel.” Writing in The Saturday Review, Helen Beal Woodward said she found it “shot through with hatred,” an opinion shared by Granville Hicks, who wrote in The New York Times that it was “written out of hate.” A review in Time magazine asked, “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman — in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?”
Atlas Shrugged is 1,084 pages in length (small type, slim margins). It includes a bombastic, authoritarian, and tediously repetitious speech by the book’s hero, John Galt, that goes on and on for an astonishing 58 pages. The speech re-appears in Ayn Rand’s book For the New Intellectual, where it takes up 77 pages in slightly larger type.
Yet Atlas Shrugged has sold more than seven million copies. In 2009 its annual sales reached a high-water mark of 520,000. That same year it ranked #1 in Amazon’s “Fiction and Literature” category. It also took the top spot in a 1998 Modern Library poll. The Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of Rand’s works annually, including Atlas Shrugged, to high-school students.
Rand’s book has had a decisive impact on a variety of influential people, including several prominent economists — Ludwig von Mises and Alan Greenspan among them — and an assortment of U.S. political figures. Of particular interest is Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, a Catholic who ran for vice president on the Republican ticket in the last election. Although the urban legend has been debunked that Ryan has required all his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged, there is little doubt that Rand has influenced his economic thinking. At a Washington, D.C., gathering five years ago honoring the author, Ryan stated, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
What is Atlas Shrugged all about, and what is the meaning of its curious title? The novel explores a dystopian America during an unidentified age in which its most productive citizens refuse to be exploited any longer by increasing taxes and tighter government regulations, and simply disappear. The consequence of U.S. society losing its ablest and most self-actualizing individuals is world collapse. John Galt, the heroic leader of this exodus, achieves precisely what he set out to achieve: “stopping the motor of the world.”
Galt returns from his self-imposed exile to save the disintegrating world by urging people to believe in themselves and work productively and achieve individual happiness. He concludes his 58-page polemic with these words: “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Galt closes the novel by gesturing his tribute to the importance of money, “the barometer of a society’s virtue”: “He raised his hand — and over the desolate earth, he traced in space the sign of the dollar.”
In Rand’s thinking, the productive individuals have been carrying the world on their backs, as did the mythical titan, Atlas. In the novel, Francisco d’Anconia, a copper industrialist and Galt’s closest friend, asks him, “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort, the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?” D’Anconia answers his own question: “What would you tell him? To shrug.”
When Atlas shrugged, the whole world toppled, symbolizing the need the world has for the courageous and self-assertive individuals who have been carrying it and have now decided to disappear and let the world collapse.
The philosophy embedded in Atlas Shrugged is the inversion of Marxist economics. For Rand, the ruling class is more important to society than the working class. The members of the former group are the producers of wealth; those of the latter are “useless parasites.” What her philosophy does have in common with Marxism is the view that there is a radical split between one class and another. Concomitant with this split is a lofty evaluation of one class and a low evaluation of the other. But for Rand, the ruling class operates according to a realistic metaphysics while the working class operates according to the “metaphysics of a leech,” illicitly drawing its sustenance from others.
The great disparity between these two groups is made abundantly evident in a pivotal episode in the novel in which all the passengers on a train die in a tunnel accident. Rand, narrating, expresses no sorrow for the victims of this catastrophe and implies that they deserved to perish because they were living with the wrong set of ideas. She describes, one by one, the mental errors of these unfortunate souls: The sociologist traveling in Car No. 1 taught that individual abilities are of no consequence. The journalist in Car No. 2 believed that it was proper to use compulsion “for a good cause.” The elderly schoolteacher in Car No. 3 taught her students that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil. The newspaper publisher in Car No. 4 believed that men are evil by nature. And so on. These first four passengers could have been philosophical reincarnations of Comte, Marx, Rousseau, and Hobbes, respectively.
Atlas Shrugged, as its author has described it, explores “the role of man’s mind in existence.” Rand does not see her characters so much as flesh-and-blood human beings but as carriers of ideas. The hapless train passengers, for example, were indistinguishable from their ideas. And since their minds housed the wrong ideas, in Rand’s view, they lost all justification for living.
It is a perfectly legitimate part of philosophy to refute an idea. But when a character is seen solely as the embodiment of his philosophical ideas, refutation becomes equivalent to assassination.
Neither love nor mercy plays any role in Atlas Shrugged. Characters who have the right ideas — Galt and his like-minded companions — are not loved but admired. And no mercy is given to those poor souls who live by the wrong ideas. All the characters, therefore, are cardboard cutouts. The “objectivist” philosophy that permeates Atlas Shrugged is perfectly suited for someone who is playing Monopoly. In such a game, the players can be as selfish as they want to be. When the game is over, they shake hands and return to their real lives, which are played out under profoundly different rules. In life, selfishness leads to isolation from and contempt for others. In no way can selfishness produce a better world. Real life involves inter-relationships, friendships, and virtue that is based not on admiration but on love. Nobel Prize-winning economist and far-left New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is unusually insightful when he describes Atlas Shrugged as a danger to young readers because it is “a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.”
Atlas, the titan, is tired of holding up the world. He shrugs and lets it fall and splinter into pieces. “Altruism is the root of all evil” — this maxim has a central place in Rand’s philosophy. No one, not even Atlas, should ever sacrifice himself for others.
This image is, indeed, intriguing. But it is also the antithesis of Christ, who willingly bears the weight of the cross, a burden made heavy by the accumulated sins of mankind. Christ wept in the Garden of Gethsemane. His tears were composed of love, mercy, and the hope of redemption. He, as a good shepherd, did not abandon His flock. Atlas shrugged and thereby separated himself from the better part of the human race. It would have been better had Atlas wept and not shrugged. But in Rand’s world, this is to expect too much, even of a titan.
Ayn Rand has been called the “godless goddess of greed.” Greed, not Jesus, is her god. She even titles one of the book’s chapters “The Utopia of Greed.” In rejecting the God of love, she must install herself as His replacement. But she does not make a convincing god. After reading Atlas Shrugged, reviewer John Chamberlain chastised Rand for trying “to rewrite the Sermon on the Mount.”
Rand considered herself to be history’s second greatest philosopher. “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle,” she once said. As a tribute to this ancient Greek thinker, the three parts of Atlas Shrugged bear references to Aristotle’s logic: “Non-contradiction,” “Either-Or,” and “A is A” (the principle of identity). According to this principle, since A is A, it cannot be other than itself, or non-A. Therefore, any particular thing must be either A or non-A.
It is highly questionable, however, if Ayn Rand was well versed in Aristotelian logic. For example, Aristotle distinguished between contradictory and contrary opposition. Contradictories are always opposed to each other. If one is true, its contradictory is false, and vice versa. A and non-A are contradictories: If something is A, it cannot be non-A; if something is not A, it must be non-A. But with contrary opposition, the opposition is not complete. Both contraries can be simultaneously false. Hot and cold are contraries (within the genus of temperature), but the temperature of a thing can be neither hot nor cold but lukewarm.
Rand’s logical problem, as evident in Atlas Shrugged, is that she sometimes treats contraries as if they were contradictories. She believes that if Marxist collectivism is false, then radical individualism must be true. But these two philosophical views do not contradict each other, according to Aristotelian logic. They are contraries and can therefore be simultaneously false. If this is the case, then something else would be true.
When she labels Christianity as “the best kindergarten of communism possible,” Rand confuses contraries with contradictories. Christianity and communism are radically disjunctive belief systems. Christianity, which is concerned with the infinite and immortal value of every human being, is hardly identifiable with the collectivist view that has little or no regard for the individual. John Galt urges his listeners to “sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.” But it is grossly unfair to characterize all mystics as people who hold individual life as valueless. True Christians are in the world but not of the world. Nonetheless, they regard both worlds — this one and the next — as important, one preparing the way for the other. This is another example of how Rand treats contraries as contradictories. It is wrong to be totally selfish; but it is also wrong to consider one’s own life to be worthless.
In a 1964 interview in Playboy magazine, sociologist Alvin Toffler put forth the following question to Rand: “In Atlas Shrugged you wrote, ‘There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.’ Isn’t this a rather black-and-white set of values?”
Rand responded: “It most certainly is. I most emphatically advocate a black-and-white view of the world. Let us define this. What is meant by the expression ‘black and white’? It means good and evil. Before you can identify anything as gray, as middle of the road, you have to know what is black and what is white, because gray is merely a mixture of the two. And when you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.”
“Then you believe in absolutes?” Toffler asked.
“I do,” was Rand’s laconic reply.
Philosophical ideas, however, do not mix in the mind the way colors do on a palette. Christian personalism is not a mixture of collectivism and radical individualism but an entirely different philosophy. It has its own distinct unity and integrity. It is not a blend and has a rightful claim to its own purity.
When Karol Wojtyla wrote The Acting Person, he exposed the errors of Marxist “totalism” on the one hand, and the errors of Cartesian subjectivism on the other. It was not a case of “either-or” because these two philosophical views were not contradictories but contraries. In the place of these two extremes, the future Bl. John Paul II developed a philosophy of personalism, a dynamic integration of individual uniqueness and communal obligation. The Acting Person discusses what it means to be a unique person, acting with others in the world. St. Augustine undertook a similar task in describing the identity of the human person. He wrote a book refuting Pelagianism, the view that man is wholly good. He wrote another book refuting the opposite view, Manichaeism, that man is essentially corrupt. For Augustine, man is good, created in the image of God, but weakened by original sin. In other words, Augustine found both contraries to be false and proposed a third way that describes the true nature of man. For the Bishop of Hippo, it was not a case of “either-or.”
This notion of the person is completely absent in Atlas Shrugged. But its absence cannot be blamed on Aristotle’s logic. It is ironic that the only philosopher in history to whom Ayn Rand acknowledges any indebtedness is one whom she misunderstands and consequently distorts.
The simplistic, but logically invalid, identification of contraries with contradictories makes life appear to be both easy and appealing. If freedom and authority contradict each other, and if authority is wrong, then freedom must be good. The same simplistic resolutions can be made for the oppositions between self and other, man and God, citizen and government, rights and obligations, will and truth, this life and the life hereafter. Would it not be a glorious life if the self were not encumbered by the other — man by God, citizen by government, and so forth? But life so simplified represents a utopian delusion. The cross, by contrast, is an intersection of two vectors where, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “the fire and the rose are one.”
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