Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (22 page)

But Toohey also symbolizes the essence of the Russian
sobornost’
against which Rand was reacting. In Russian thought,
sobornost’
signified a mystic or spiritual union of all people in society. Individuals would allegedly retain their uniqueness, but in practice, the Russian ideal involved the dissolution of the individual into an
organic
totality. The communists merely secularized this vision of conciliarity; they retained the Russian impulse toward the material
and
spiritual subordination of the individual, but substituted the State for the body of Christ.

Toohey’s newspaper column, “One Small Voice,” features endless attacks against individualism that reek of Russian
sobornost’.
In many ways, he extols the virtue of the cultic loss of self, a theme that was prominent in the
writings of the Nietzschean Russian Symbolists. But Toohey goes further: he advocates the sacrificing and subordinating of the individual to the almighty One. Rand uncovers this pretentious use of altruistic language as an ideological tool to conquer the human spirit, to make men small and insignificant, to rule the masses by elevating mediocrity and ridiculing greatness.

In her portrayal of Toohey, Rand also continues her literary policy of integrating the traits of
mind
and body. She depicts her chief villain as a repulsive swine. She writes in her outline, that Toohey’s “puny physical appearance seems to be a walking testimonial to the spiritual pus filling his blood vessels.”
⁴²

Despite her emphasis on the individual’s ego as the
fountainhead
of human progress, Rand had provided a far more complex psychological portrait of the mass men as fragmented and incomplete. In opposition to this splintered picture of a human being, Rand began to articulate a nondualistic, nonatomistic view of the genuine individual.

While writing
The Fountainhead
, Rand continued her paean to individualism in her novelette,
Anthem
, originally titled
Ego
(Reedstrom 1993b). Written in 1937, first published in England in 1938, Rand’s futuristic story offers an alternative to
Zamiatin
’s visions of a technologically advanced collectivist dystopia. Rand projects the primitive conditions that
must
predominate in any social order that destroys the individual. In
Anthem
, total collectivism has led to the obliteration of industry and the distortion of human relationships. Peoples’ names have been replaced by euphemistic code words and numerical notations. Even the word “I” has been lost. The rediscovery of this word by the protagonist of the story is one of Rand’s most poetic tributes to individualism. Foreshadowing the egoistic ethical credo of
Atlas Shrugged
, uniting body and
soul
through secular means, Equality 7-2521 proclaims:

“I am. I think. I will. What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.… This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.… My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man’s soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.”
⁴³

At the end of the novelette, Rand’s protagonist has renamed himself Prometheus. He escapes the collectivist society with the woman he loves to build a new individualist culture. In her elevation of Promethean individuality, Rand inherits the Nietzschean-Symbolist leitmotif, without its penchant for Dionysian emotionalism, organic collectivism, or the cultic loss of self.
⁴⁴
The genuine individual is neither slave nor master; he does not submit to, or seek self-assertion through, the rule of the collective.

EARLY NONFICTION

Mixed reviews of
The Fountainhead
did not block Rand from achieving commercial success. In the early 1940s, Rand was planning to write her first nonfiction work, “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” She wrote a condensed version called,
“
The Only Path to Tomorrow,”
which appeared in
Reader’s Digest.
Rand considered the essay a “bromide” to serve as the credo for a broad union of Old Right intellectuals committed to capitalism. The group never materialized primarily because of its ideological diversity (B. Branden 1986, 163). Nevertheless, during this period, Rand had the opportunity to interact with several conservative and libertarian thinkers and activists, including
Channing Pollock
,
Albert Jay Nock
, Ruth
Alexander
,
Rose Wilder Lane
, Isabel Paterson,
Henry Hazlitt
, and Ludwig von Mises, the father of the contemporary
Austrian school of economics
and the teacher of the renowned Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek (163, 188). Rand championed the Austrian school of economics in her later nonfiction essays. Though she shared much in common with her procapitalist political contemporaries, she was often disappointed by what she perceived as their cynicism, subjectivism, and mysticism.

Despite its political clichés, “The Only Path to Tomorrow” provides a first peek at Rand as a public philosopher. In the essay, Rand argues that totalitarian ideology is the greatest threat to civilization. She posits a historical antagonism between “Active Man” and “Passive Man.” “Active Man” is another name for Howard Roark. “Active Man” is the individualist. He is a producer, creator, and originator. He requires independence and “neither needs nor seeks power over other men—nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion” (Rand 1944, 89).

“Passive Man” was another name for Peter Keating. He dreads independence and “is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told” (90). Collectivism breeds upon such passivity. It is an ideology that unites the masses through “the ancient principle of savagery.”

Interestingly, Rand does not argue that the needy are parasites on the wealthy. She states emphatically that “Passive Man” can be rich or poor. Coming from all social classes, the “Passive Man” is a parasite on the genuine productive achievements of the “Active Man.” This theme reappears in much more sophisticated form in Rand’s mature critique of contemporary statism.

Rand’s well-known antipathy for Soviet
collectivism
enabled her to contribute an anticommunist tract to the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Written in 1946, the
“Screen Guide for Americans”
followed the same form as her earlier
Reader’s Digest
article. Rand supported the
communists’
right to express their ideas, but argued that moviegoers and producers should not be obligated to patronize and sanction projects that aimed to corrupt American institutions.

In the pamphlet, Rand posited a stark battle between Freedom and Slavery, between republican government and dictatorship. Of greatest philosophical relevance is Rand’s contention that the dictator is not an individualist. He is “by definition … the most complete collectivist of all, because he exists by ruling, crushing and exploiting a huge collection of men” (Rand 1947, 49). Rand had transferred her insights on the “soul of the collectivist” into a successful piece of political propaganda for the Hollywood
film
industry.

Throughout the 1940s, Rand wrote several screenplays, including the film version of
The Fountainhead
, which starred Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey;
You Came Along
, starring Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott; and an especially romantic
Love Letters
,
with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.
⁴⁵
These works adumbrate typically Randian themes, but they are of little or no independent philosophical interest. The 1940s were marked by something much more important to Rand’s intellectual maturation. The celebrated author began working on the magnum opus of her literary career.

A
TLAS
S
HRUGGED

In
The Fountainhead
, Rand focused on the principles of
individualism
and collectivism as manifested within the individual’s soul. The personal conflicts faced by each of her characters are primarily internal. Each character is a mixture of two extremes symbolized by Howard Roark and Ellsworth Toohey. The characters are defined not by their
relations
to one another, but by their specific natures. Their social ties were secondary and derivative of the central theme.

In 1945, Rand began to outline a new novel, initially called
The Strike.
She wanted to change her focus radically by delving deeply into the
dialectical
interrelationships between characters, social structures, and institutional processes. She wished to proceed “from persons, in terms of history, society, and the world.” Her emphasis was not on Active Man or Passive Man, not on prime movers or second-handers. Rather, “the story must be primarily a picture of the whole,” Rand stated in her journal.
⁴⁶
For Rand,
Atlas Shrugged
was “to be much more a ‘social’ novel than
The Fountainhead.
” First and foremost, the novel had to focus on the cluster of relationships that constitute the social totality:

Now, it is this
relation
that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In
The Fountainhead
I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are out consciously to destroy him. But the theme was Roark—not Roark’s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation. (x)

As a novel,
Atlas Shrugged
explores these relations in every dimension of human life. Rand traces the links between political economy and sex, education and art, metaphysics and psychology, money and moral values. She concentrates extensively on the union of spiritual and physical realms, on the specific, concrete means by which certain productive individuals move the world, and by which others live off of their creations. She attempts to show the social importance of the creative act by documenting what would happen if the prime movers, the “men of the mind,” were to go on strike.
⁴⁷

No summary of
Atlas Shrugged
could possibly unravel its intricacies. The book boasts a long list of protagonists and villains, but it centers around the exploits of Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, two industrialists who attempt to keep their respective businesses afloat in a global economy plagued by extensive government intervention and growing social chaos. The economic devastation wrought by growing
statism
is made worse by a conspiracy of omission. As the state becomes more intrusive, creative thinkers and producers from every profession begin to disappear. They unite secretly behind John Galt, a brilliant inventor, who leads a “strike of the men of the mind.” These people of creative ability desert their businesses and leave the statists nothing to loot. They retire to a capitalist utopia in the mountains of Colorado known as Galt’s Gulch.

It takes Dagny a long time to realize that she is fighting to keep her transcontinental railroad alive in a parasitical society that is slowly consuming her.
As the world heads toward cataclysm, the leader of the United States government takes to the airwaves to issue a call for calm. Using specially developed technology, Galt interrupts the broadcast and proceeds to explain the cause of the decline of civilization. His speech touches on nearly every major branch of philosophy; it is the essence of Rand’s
Objectivist
worldview. Galt asks the remaining producers to stop permitting their own victimization and join the strike. When the strike succeeds in stopping the motor of the world, the people of creative ability return on their own terms, to rebuild a truly human society.

Integrating science fiction and fantasy, symbolism and realism, philosophy and romance, Rand’s novel inspires passionate responses from admirers and critics alike. Admirers see the book as the credo of a new intellectual movement, but critics from both ends of the political spectrum are repulsed. Left-leaning reviewers abhorred Rand’s preoccupation with
capitalism
, whereas conservative columnists were sickened by Rand’s
atheism
.
Granville Hicks
(1957) asserted that “the book is written out of hate.” He condemned Rand for “cheerfully” celebrating “the destruction of civilization.” And
Whittaker Chambers
, writing for
National Review
, sensed that Rand was heavily indebted to Nietzsche. But he believed that in her
atheism
and
“materialism,”
Rand had greater affinity with
Marx
. Chambers wrote: “Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Chambers believed that in the “dictatorial tone” and “overriding arrogance” of the book, one can hear a voice “from almost any page … commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”
⁴⁸

These hostile
reviews
from the left and the right partially reflected Rand’s own belief that she had finally achieved a genuine philosophical synthesis that was neither Marxist nor
religious
. In her philosophic journals, Rand explained that her novel had to
“vindicate
the industrialist” as “the author of material production.” Rand wished to secularize the spiritual, and spiritualize the material:

The material is only the expression of the spiritual; that it can neither be created
nor used
without the spiritual (thought); that it has no meaning without the spiritual, that it is only the means to a spiritual end—and therefore, any new achievement in the realm of material production is an act of
high
spirituality
, a great triumph and expression of man’s spirit. And that those who despise “the material” are those who despise man and whose basic premises are aimed at man’s destruction.
⁴⁹