Second only to the Bible?
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged’s challenge, and a Christian Transhumanist response.
Published in 1957 and selling over 12 million copies to date, Atlas Shrugged is a dystopian tale of the collapse of America as leading brains go on strike in protest at “looters” (i.e. corrupt US Government) and “moochers” (those living ungratefully and self-righteously on the work of others). The novel, and Rand’s philosophy, “Objectivism”, hold surprising sway in Silicon Valley, amongst secular transhumanism and libertarian small-government circles.
The novel imagines the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et. al, and their key lieutenants vanishing and their businesses failing. Society collapses as infrastructure breaks down. Governments take control of the companies and swindle the diminishing resources for the benefit of their cronies. A factional split and incompetence lead to the catastrophic misuse of a government sonic weapon, devastating a huge area of the central United States.
It transpires the ‘productive class’ are hiding away in a valley in Colorado, awaiting the inevitable collapse of the US government, economy, and way of life, before returning to lead a laissez-faire capitalist utopia.
At ~600,000 words, it’s nearly as long as the Bible’s 780,000-ish. In an (arguably overhyped) Library of Congress Survey in 1991, it was rated “second only to the Bible” in terms of personally impacting people’s lives. I’ve made it through 63 hours on Audible three times now, and followed up Objectivism (Peikoff, 1991).
Born in 1905, she saw the worst of the Russian revolution firsthand at a critically impressionable age. Speaking little English when she arrived in Chicago in 1926, she rapidly self-taught, and in 1932 sold her first screenplay in Hollywood. Her greatest novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead), whislt mainly stories of industrialists striving for excellence against mediocrity, contain raw and passionate romance that only a woman could write. Objectivism is embodied through the characters.
Her character John Galt’s famous oath, “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”, and the proposed amendment to the re-born US constitution, “the Government shall make no law limiting production and trade” portray a rigid fundamentalism of individualism, capitalism, atheism, and the evils of any kind of collectivism, that inevitably hinders human potential.
Easy to speculate she over-reacted to the collectivist communist horror of her youth.
Reading her non-fiction philosophical writing, I find myself cheering and booing to consecutive lines. Alternating positive insights with terribly shallow caricatures of the nature of human communities, of faith, of human nature, and of other philosophers, I found myself despairing of either loving or loathing her ideas. I have to do both.
She is too perceptive to dismiss, and too wrong to not criticise. So let’s draw out the best, and critique the worst.
The Positives
1. Celebration of the creative mind. The development of the modern milieu, from constitutional government, through science and technology, and the power of scaling industry to benefit millions depends on the human mind. Human progress does not appear by magic, but by hard work and disciplined application of intelligence and reason. We can all be heroes in our own context. The mental discipline of choosing to focus is her foundation of free will and human flourishing.
2. Building the world. Engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors, builders, and artists do not merely “make money”; they convert knowledge into reality for the benefit of millions. The creators of new technologies walk lonely roads, true only to themselves, following a vision, not crowds.
3. Creativity held back: Powerful (but exaggerated) diagnosis of the “looters” i.e. governments working for their own benefit, rather than the long-term good of the nation, and “moochers”, who contribute nothing and drain common resources, whilst asserting their moral superiority and entitlements over those who work hard. (“Status inversion” – where productive competence is morally suspect.) Those seeking political power are usually of lower competence. Cabinet ministers in Australia are paid around middle management in a productive engineering enterprise.
4. Regulatory capture and political parasitism – identified by Rand decades before becoming common talking points. How those with “pull” get the government to help them, noting US politicians spend around half their working hours fundraising.
5. Collectivism tends to coercion: Her suspicion of state-enforced sacrifice deserves to be taken seriously. State coercion of law-abiding citizens occurs in any big-government society. Collectivism preys on individualism, removing incentives, enforcing mediocrity and crowd following. Echoed today in those who idolise ‘diversity’ while enforcing group-think.
6. Debunking Marx’s “seize the means of production” by observing the means of production are in fact human minds. These cannot be expropriated by a coercive state without losing their creative spark, judgment, inventiveness, and their network of like minds that created the factories Marx envied.
The Negatives:
1. Metaphysical absolutism: that physical material is eternal and immutable. Physics now has proof beyond reasonable doubt that the material in this universe (whatever the universe is) is neither eternal nor immutable. Functioning as a rival metaphysical faith, this foundational error leads, via a tortuous path, to surprising places. Rejecting as ‘emotional’ ethical archetypes beyond her sanctified industrialist heroes, she decries morality as ‘whim worshipping’. The only definition of what is ‘good’ is what helps man survive and thrive (single gender used throughout).
2. That Reason is sufficient. Epistemology without fallibilism. Her assertion that unaided human Reason is the paramount undefeatable human attribute is easily contradicted by the Critical Rationalism of Karl Popper. She holds a naïve view that humans observe clearly, and reason precisely. Face reality: all observations are “theory laden”. All reason is subject to motivated reasoning, evidence filters and incomplete information. Even her novels portray thought processes that falsify her assertion.
3. That individual dignity equals metaphysical self-sufficiency. Her views of the importance of the individual correspond with those of Jung and his successors that human flourishing requires individuation, that each person blossom according to their individual capabilities and gifts. But no individual is self-grounding. We all benefit (or suffer) from the culture, language, knowledge, health and infrastructure bequeathed to us.
4. Her Anthropology is too thin. Humans are not the rational producers she portrays. We are embodied, relational, symbolic, wounded, aspirational, spiritual beings. She does not account for children, the elderly, those of different ability, and the rounded out fallen Imago Dei nature of real people.
5. Shallow doctrine of sin. She rightly castigates envy, weakness, mediocrity and parasitism. But she misses pride, anger, lust, gluttony, and avarice. So she gets two of the Catholic seven deadly sins. Rand sees the sins of weakness clearly, but not the sins of strength. Her productive heroes are too morally clean. In real life, such people are driven, litigious, take no prisoners in conflict and push themselves and those around them to the limit. Her ‘good’ characters are lily-white, lacking complexity. This is important to Christian Transhumanism because intelligence, competence and strength are not safe unless guarded by positive morals.
6. Caricature of community. Human communities, including families, churches, scientific traditions, firms and nations are channels of human formation, loyalty, love, shared meaning and mutuality. Her own Objectivist community was deeply riven. Is that a predictable outcome when you think human communities tend to be self-predatory?
7. Caricature of faith. All reasoning begins from axioms, premises, perceptions, and interpretive frameworks. Her atheism rests on the disproved premise of eternal and immutable matter. That is her faith, a process identical to mainstream mature Christians. Faith, in Hebrews 11:1, is not irrationality but trustful apprehension of realities not available to laboratory verification. For Christians, faith and reason work together. Reason is limited, and faith is a foundation, that the universe is created, and that Jesus is at least our highest moral archetype.
8. Caricature of Christianity. She portrays a 2D cut-out strawman of Christianity as anti-reason, anti-life, anti-joy and anti-achievement. One of her weakest points, she makes no attempt to seriously engage Christianity, relying on slogans and false certainties.
9. Altruism is evil. Underlying John Galt’s quote above is a principle that takes some explaining. Rand defines altruism in a very specific and aggressive way: not merely kindness, generosity, or helping others, but the moral doctrine that self-sacrifice is the essence of virtue and that your life properly belongs to others. She believes altruism means your own interests are morally inferior to others, and that the more you suffer for others, undeserving as they might be, the more moral you are. Altruism is not usually defined in such a simplistic manner. Most people, even most Christians, do not mean “self-annihilation” by altruism. They mean concern for others, often within reciprocity, duty, affection, or shared humanity. Rand’s absolutism cannot be defended from a broad reading of Scripture. She does not refute Christian love; she refutes a pathological parody of it.
Rand thinks her ‘Objectivist’ system yields a comprehensive worldview, an integrated structure of ideas that explains reality in an internally ordered way. Far from it. Her metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and politics, and are contentious and easy to refute, at least in part.
Christian Transhumanism’s triage of Objectivism
Rand viewed man as a “heroic being” whose highest purpose is his own happiness and productive achievement. Transhumanists share the drive to overcome limitations through effort. She captures the pro-actionary, boundary-pushing spirit of transhumanism, but strips it of the communal grace required to bring humanity to wholeness.
Christian Transhumanism concurs with Rand’s vision of a world powered by the human mind, but argues that without grace, community, the real presence of the Holy Spirit and of faith, the mind builds a lonely tower, not a graceful future community where all humans reach their maximal potential and fulfilment.
The upside of Objectivism is it is easy to understand. To me, it’s a great framework for partly agreeing and partly disagreeing. Her designated heir, Leonard Peikoff, wrote the definitive book “Objectivism” (1991). This contains several main themes: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Anthropology, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. Following many years’ development, the next few blogs will cover these topics to outline what I hope will be the basis for a future CTA comprehensive worldview and philosophy, or at least, fertile discussion grounds for it.
We will seek after the heroic human, but with grace, community and bringing good thoughts from all those who have sought to understand this amazing universe.