"I feel like I just gave birth...to an accountant!"
If we can indeed read Rand's own self-estimation into her portrayal of John Galt, then her opinion of her own importance is quite expansive. There is much talk about technological wonders and robust creativity, but it's all rather proforma, and the main materialistic drivers of the story are all sci-fi McGuffins: Reardon Metal, Galt's magical motor that runs on static electricity in the air, the wondrously-engineered railroad bridge that Hank Reardon scrawls on a cocktail napkin (or some equivalent), the hidden valley's force-field that protects the Galtian utopia from detection. In short, with 1200 pages to work with, and a desire to pay worship to the power of productivity, Rand essentially dashes off the actual description of making stuff in a fairly haphazard manner, so she can get back to her philosophical soapbox. The actual creative process, with all of its waste, false starts, and failures, does not seem to interest her that much, in the big scheme of things.

Here, we're into the strange mismatch in this novel: the uneasy fit between a Germanic, Nietzschian-Wagnerian desire for heroic, romantic action -- and the British, Utilitarian philosophy that lies behind the political economy of capitalism. Rand desperately wants science and industry to be majestic, soaring entities, not the prosaic grindings of a system that churns out things like the Snuggie and the Pocket Fisherman. Business and science are ultimately slow, tedious, non-heroic endeavors, filled with dead-ends, frauds, dashed dreams, and faulty premises. This is not the Randian vision of the rational and the creative.

For Rand, "the human is the rational." History has not been particularly kind to this idea, but it is typical of philosophers, religious types, and the public in general. The animal part of humanity is the enemy, and becoming fully human entails overcoming, escaping, dominating, or transcending our own biology. The history of this separation of the human from the animal is the story of civilizational collapse and our impending planetary catastrophes.

Rand could not have foreseen that the problem of capitalism would not be lack of knowledge or production, but in fact the opposite: too much activity, too much creativity, too much crap, with the human race swimming in rivers of its own industrial effluent. She also did not foresee (perhaps it was impossible at the height of the Cold War) that Big Government was in fact no threat to Big Business at all. Indeed, these two have fused together over the last few decades in America, so that a corporatized federal government grows in lockstep with the economy as a whole.

It is interesting to see how sharp a divide Rand puts between the virtuous businessman and the mooching, humanitarian looters in government. It reminded me of a couple things. In his great book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Puritan businessmen, uncomfortable with the idea that one cannot earn his way to heaven (salvation only by grace being the operative Calvinist idea), read their own success as a sign of their election. Obviously, because they are successful and wealthy, they must be part of the Chosen, the Elect. Of course, only God knows for sure, but cash and power are probably good indicators of virtue. This idea runs all through Atlas Shrugged, so that need is seen as an obvious lack of virtue. It's also the same idea that Thomas Frank explores in What's the Matter with Kansas? How can successful, rich, powerful Conservatives continue to reap electoral fruit with the absurd notion that there is a liberal elite keeping them down? And while Republican fortunes are lately on the wane, the general motif still has much force in the mainstream media: that government and labor stand on one side of the economic divide, impeding the more mature, responsible endeavors of the business world. Again, this is a complete misrepresentation of conditions on the ground. In the real world, every capitalist country sees its government spending grow as its overall GDP increases (see my earlier post, Stimulus Fandago). As the economy draws more and more commodities and services into its maw, it gains strength vis-a-vis the government, and captures it, using it for its own purposes. The dirty secret of the business world is that most large companies prefer government regulation, as it can be crafted to their desires by their crones in power, to suit their needs and limit competition. And of course, a growing tax pie means more deals for more private contractors, especially if your business happens to be defense-related.

So really, the core of Atlas Shrugged is a great conceit: the idea the truly rational, heroic, and virtuous do not seek to rule by force. Indeed, these heroes among us will eventually become totally powerless, at the mercy of the socialists, humanitarians, gangsters, moochers, and looters. And in effect, John Galt picks up his marbles and goes home, promising that he will not play any more until he can make the rules; i.e., until the rest of the country collapses around him and his band of mighty producers. This makes the entire novel take on the feel of a Capitalist Rapture, like the evangelical Left Behind books, whereby the virtuous are snatched up to heaven (in this case, Colorado), thus spared from the torturous Armageddon that awaits the sinners. One of the last scenes in the book is profoundly rapturous. After springing Galt out of a New Hampshire torture facility (run by the government, of course), our group of protagonists is on their escape plane to Colorado, making one last pass over New York City, just as the Big Apple's lights are all extinguished. Word had just reached the city that the only transcontinental passage had been destroyed, so mass panic had ensued, because of the impending food shortage. But Galt and company are safely on their way, to hole up in their mountain Shangri-La while destruction descends on the rest of the country. It's a very creepy ending, and seems as full of schadenfreude as any of the Left Behind books.

Okay, almost done. What was most interesting to me, as a student of intentional communities, was the brief Utopian kernel at the heart of Atlas Shrugged. This is a 100-page section near the middle of the book, entitled "Atlantis," where Dagny Taggert (the beautiful female VP of the country's largest railroad) is first introduced to John Galt's hidden valley, where all of the great industrial minds of the country have come to take up residence, performing low-tech, low-pay jobs for each other in a perfectly free, gold-standard-only community. It is, of course, an idyllic spot, with simple, rustic, hand-built homes, and cottage-industry grade manufacturing tools. But the occupants are free from government interference, and they can live their lives rationally, and only for themselves, with the vaunted Invisible Hand taking care of the rest.

But the real key here is scale. What would make a community like Galt's valley work is its small size. If Galt's crew continued to grow their town into a large, sprawling city, all of the dysfunctions of large-scale would kick in: crime, disease, social stratification, corrupt government, etc. In short, why, after America collapses, should we expect John Galt and his heroic libertarians to prevail the next time? What would make them immune to all of the ills that plague every bloated civilization in history? I admire Rand's idea of the old being swept away by the new, to be replaced by the outgrowths of a Utopian community seed. But it seems that she overestimates her own originality in thinking that her scheme will finally be the one that is immune to the laws of society and history. Perhaps that's why she consistently has John Galt saying, "I am the first man to....."  If she's using that trope to indicate her own importance, it seems vastly inflated to me. There's really not much in Atlas Shrugged to warrant such grandiosity. In the long run, she's trying to do the same thing as Plato's Republic: overcome the irrationalities created by unnatural living arrangements (i.e., civilization) by postulating a ruling Philsopher King. Didn't work in ancient Greece, won't work now.

For anyone interested in why scale, and not philosophical decay, is the crucial variable in civilizational decline, check out E.F. Schumacher, and the works of  Kirkpatrick Sale.

In a paradoxical by symmetrical sense, Post-Peak Oil America may actually come to resemble John Galt's utopia. (see one possible future in James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand). However, instead of these communities being the seeds for a new industrialism, as they were in Atlas Shrugged, our postpeak settlements will come at the end of the industrial chapter, after the true motor of the world, oil, has slowed to a trickle.