by Tom Pratt
Clash of Titans:
Atlas Shrugged, John Galt & Jesus Christ
By
Chad Brand
Tom Pratt
Clash of Titans: Atlas Shrugged, John Galt & Jesus Christ
Copyright © 2012 Chad Brand and Tom Pratt
All Rights Reserved
Cover Photo by Fly Navy
Licensed by Creative Commons
To Our Children and Grandchildren
For the World they will Inherit
Chad
Tashia, Owen, Cassandra
Katelyn, Cora, Madison, Keira, Kameron, Buck
Tom
Tom, III and Dale
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 - What Is Atlas Shrugged?
Chapter 2 - The Utopia of Greed
Chapter 3 - The Guiltless Man
Chapter 4 - The Moratorium on Brains
Chapter $ - The Sign of the Dollar
Chapter 6 - My Brother’s Keeper
Chapter 7 - The Clash of the Titans
Chapter 8 - Who Is John Galt?
Chapter 9 - The Man Who Loved His Life
Chapter 10 - The anti-Anti-Christ
Chapter 11 - The Egoist
Chapter 12 - God & Mammon
Chapter 13 - I Am; Therefore I Think
Chapter 14 - Who Is Jesus Christ?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
This a book about a book, as well as an author, that takes a negative stance toward Christian faith and its truth claims. It is not often that people like your present authors recommend the serious reading of such writings to the general public and especially to that of professed Christian believers. In this case we make a resounding exception. Read Atlas Shrugged! Read it carefully and thoroughly and enjoy its drama and mystery and romance, but whatever you do, read it through and ponder its “message” in light of current events. However, a warning is in order about the book you have before you. It reveals a lot of the plot in some detail and quotes extensively from its pages. The purpose in our doing so is to encourage the casual reader of reviews and summaries to get beyond what you may have heard and read and buy and read the book itself before you make up your mind about its relationship to traditional Christian themes. It is an important work about a very contemporary subject that deserves more than a casual dismissal as some atheist’s hatchet job on Christianity. Our experience has been that without knowing and understanding the context of Ayn Rand’s philosophy enfleshed in Atlas Shrugged, many Christians have reacted negatively, with unhappy consequences, to truth that could not be conveyed in any other way than Rand has done it.
Ayn Rand, as we explain at least briefly, came of age in the Soviet political slave-camp nation established in Russia in 1917. She was influenced by the tradition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and takes her understanding of Christianity from that milieu. Her literary tradition is Russian, and she was of the conviction that great ideas require more than abstract speculative explication to communicate real understanding. They require the concrete portrayal of the novel to make them come to life. This is the tradition of Atlas Shrugged and her other works of fiction. She wanted the masses of people to read and understand her philosophy in its actual working environment. With that in mind we have used lots of her own words and scenes to hopefully accomplish what we would not have been able to otherwise—pique the interest of those who may be predisposed to simply ignore or excoriate her work in a way that propositional statements and discussion of her ideas will not suffice to do. Furthermore, in today’s atmosphere of hostility to evangelically oriented Christianity many are wondering with the old line in the movie ‘Marathon Man,’ “Is it safe?” Yes it is! And we hope the contextualization we have sought in lengthy quotations highlights this fact.
We have also written this book for another audience—those who wholeheartedly or at least agnostically embrace Rand’s atheism and distrust of Christianity. It is our hope that you may find something here that will cause you to investigate further the truth claims of Christian faith and find them not as formidable to the rational mind as you have been led to believe. We think Ayn Rand was familiar intimately with only one strain of Christian tradition and did not have a full grasp on the rational basis for faith in the Western traditions. We cannot know her mind, but we do know from what is written in the speeches of characters in Atlas Shrugged and her other works that misconceptions are apparent. If you are one of those who has only dipped superficially into Christian thought and the Bible, we invite you to read this book and make yourself a binding promise to investigate thoroughly who Jesus Christ is and what He has done for this material world and all its inhabitants.
But be warned one and all—if you are put off by knowing too much of the plot ahead of time, read the book first and then read this one for the discussion of its implications for Christian faith. Atlas has been around long enough now that many already know the gist of its argument and the plot and will do just fine reading this analysis first. The book is long enough and the plot is labyrinthine enough and the philosophical speeches intricate enough that we think what we have done will just build your interest in reading the whole 1200 pages. But consider yourself forewarned.
We acknowledge here the helpful work of others in filling in the holes of our personal knowledge of Rand’s life and times and the process she followed in constructing her characters and plot lines. Of particular help here have been Jennifer Burns, Anne Heller, and the compilation and editing of Edward Younkins, all of which are cited in the notes. Donald Luskin and Andrew Greta are very helpful in setting forth the contemporary parallels to the setting in the novel. David Kotter has authored a paper on some issues of Christian faith and practice relative to Rand’s work, which we also cite, and there is a website for seeing more of his work. In addition we have reviewed for information the DVD from Virgil Films and Entertainment, “Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged,” available on Amazon, as well as the film of “The Fountainhead” starring Gary Cooper as Howard Roark. We have seen also the first part of “Atlas Shrugged” on DVD and recommend it as well. All these sources are available for the interested reader, and we have found them very helpful in writing this book. Which is to say that this literary work is a product of many contributions from other sources, but that implies no endorsement on the part of any of them. What you have here is our opinion from the perspective of what some call “fans,” but we hope that doesn’t discourage your taking a little walk with us through a work of fiction that reads like today’s news.
Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Atlas Shrugged are from the Centennial Edition using Kindle for Mac.
Introduction
Who is John Galt? If you know the answer to that question, you are at least among the curious who have investigated a book that today stands next to the Bible and Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled in terms of its influence on people’s lives. (According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club [with] 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members surveyed, with a "large gap existing between the #1 book and the rest of the list".) Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has fascinated and shocked and dismayed readers for 55 years and today is once again on pundits’ lips and in headlines across the US during presidential election season. Today it stands in the top fifty of sales on Amazon and sold 500,000 copies worldwide in 2009, with comparable numbers in 2011 and is still on the New York Times bestseller list.
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Judge Clarence Thomas, several Congressmen, and now vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan are among those that have recommended the book, though Ryan has sought at times to distance himself from his endorsement. On t
he other hand, former Enron consultant and now leftist New York Times economic pundit Paul Krugman has blogged: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One 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. The other, of course, involves orcs."
[1] For many who read the book years ago (with periodic re-reads) today’s economic and political news stories have eerie similarities to the fictionalized world Ms. Rand created so long ago, “in a galaxy far, far away” (?), a possibility suggested by some who have reviewed the book as science fiction.
President Barack Obama seems to be playing a role out of the novel with his “Mr. business man…you didn’t build that” talk. And congressional leadership from both sides of the aisles seem bent on playing their parts with a Senate that refuses even to pass a budget for three years and a House that flips and flops, depending on the direction of political winds, between authorizing spending and raising or lowering taxes or doing nothing at all, but always, always, always protecting “earmarks” for their cronies. Massive public debt threatens to swamp the greatest economy in the history of the world, and the nation is more and more divided between those who work and pay income taxes and those who work and pay no income taxes and those who simply go from one government agency to the next with a hand out expecting more, or worse yet, camp out in the streets of major cities in lawless “squattervilles” of filth, drunkenness, and crime. In the approaching emergency of debt and entitlement the Obama campaign declares “we can’t wait” as his czars (35 or so of them at last count) issue directives for regulation and favoritism to various groups, financial institutions, and businesses. At the very least Ayn Rand deserves an “A” for prescience of a sort usually reserved for the messengers of Yahweh in Scripture. Luskin’s suggested parallels in the book cited above (including parallels to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Krugman, Alan Greenspan, Barney Frank, Henry Waxman and others) are apt and devastating at times.
Of course, statements like that haul a whole lot more baggage into the equation, and that’s what this little book is about. The Christian world of those called “evangelicals,” a term not so easily defined as it once was, is not really prepared for a discussion of the values of John Galt and Dagny Taggart as they impact a Christian’s economic and political thinking. We believe it is time to speak more extensively and directly from a biblical Christian perspective to the issues Ayn Rand and others are raising. Our search for any such treatment has turned up very little beyond the occasional column or blog and the simple discounting of what appears on the surface to be little more than the hopeless diatribe of a misguided and tragic writer/philosopher from a dated and unappealing thought world. “Hateful” is not an uncommon evaluation, as are “un-feeling” and “un-Christian.” John Galt is sometimes labeled “anti-Christ.” “Immorality” is, of course, a regular pejorative relating to occasional sexual content. And, always, the elephant in the front room is “atheistic.” But perhaps most obvious is the sheer disbelief that anyone could seriously conceive of a world so darkened with the selfish “egoism” (Rand’s central moral code, about which more later) of “heroes” unmoved by the pleas of others for pity and altruism. We do seem to live in a christianized cocoon of soft moralism and ethical mysticism.
In the world of the non-religious the book has been widely panned from the beginning. The book was dismissed by some as "a homage to greed", while late author Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality." Helen Beal Woodward, reviewing Atlas Shrugged for The Saturday Review, opined that the novel was written with "dazzling virtuosity" but that it was "shot through with hatred." This was echoed by Granville Hicks, writing for The New York Times Book Review, who also stated that the book was "written out of hate." The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?" In the magazine National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric" and "remarkably silly," and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term." Chambers argued against the novel's implicit endorsement of atheism, whereby "Randian man, like Marxian man is made the center of a godless world." Chambers also wrote that the implicit message of the novel is akin to "Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism" ("To a gas chamber — go!").[2] Donald Luskin in his I Am John Galt refers to the Chambers review as “a smear.”[3] Recently, Jason Lee Steorts of National Review used the word “ghastly” to refer to Rand’s relentless pursuit of the consequences of failure to stem the tide of the march of the “looters,” one of her favorite characterizations of the cadre of legalized predators upon the production of others.[4] Additionally, Marvin Olasky has warned those who would commend Rand’s thought for Christian consumption that they should specify carefully what they would recommend and what they would critique.[5] We intend to follow as best we can this injunction.
Your authors here have read the book (between them) numerous times and had discussions over the years about its implications. We have authored the current e-book from Kregel, Awaiting the City and the fuller treatment in binding and electronic version to be out in the Spring of 2013, Seeking the City, both of which seek to address biblically, theologically, historically, and politically the current state of political economy in the West. We have many years of experience in business and church and theological education and feel compelled to weigh in on Rand’s idealized world of heroic producers and slovenly moochers and looters. Our plan is fairly simple: First, we will relate a bit of the pertinent data from the life and philosophy of the author as it relates to issues of concern to professed Christians. Then, we will review briefly the story of Atlas Shrugged, keeping in mind that such outlines are numerous in the world of the internet. Further, we will raise one by one several specific issues that are at the center of the book’s argument (for that is what Rand intended it to be—she wrote the novel rather than a full philosophical treatise) with a view to a specifically biblical and theological assessment and critique.
Along this short walk around a massive novel we will be addressing the following issues specifically and others as side-paths: Aristotelian logic, objectivism, mysticism, the human mind and rational thought, the meaning of money, capitalism and political economy, the affirmation of life in a culture of death, altruism, the place of the individual in society and biblical theology, the virtue of “self-ishness,” and of course, the contrast and likeness between John Galt and Jesus Christ.
One of the things your authors have learned over time is that the cliché, “Truth is where you find it” is, well, true! We recommend Atlas Shrugged as being worth the trouble to read and absorb for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we all benefit from the various ways our minds connect to our own worldview and that of others. Seldom is a walk through the forest like this completely unprofitable. Rand’s magnum opus tests one’s patience at times and seems shocking and fantastic to some sensibilities.[6] But any serious assessment of her work must take into account its glaring and uncanny accuracy in today’s climate of failing socialistic democracies and market-oriented crony capitalism. A hinge of history may well be turning before our eyes. Rand visualized it more than half a century ago when she said: "We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
In the hope and prayer that this will not prove so just yet, we offer this alert to would-be followers of Jesus the Messiah.
Chapter 1 - What Is Atlas Shrugged?
In the heart of New York City stands a sculpture of the Titan, Atlas, holding up a massive representation of the heavens above the planet on which it stands. Weighing more than 15 tons and standing 45 feet
high, it was erected during the depths of the Great Depression (1937), the time frame for Ayn Rand’s first success as a novelist, and was intended to convey an impression of the ancient Graeco-Roman myth about a conflict between the Titans, ruled by Cronus, and the Olympians led by Zeus, the rebel against Cronus, who had become weakened in old age. Upon the defeat of the Titans Zeus sentenced Atlas, their leader, to a life of holding up the heavens. The various mythologies relate his struggle and suffering under that load. Rand eventually chose the title for her novel on the advice of her husband. She had worked on her magnum opus under the title, “The Strike,” for years, while “Atlas Shrugged” was only a chapter title. But reflection on what Atlas might have done in a different mythology led to the suggestion that he might have “shrugged” off the load as if on strike.
“Atlas” means “he who dares or suffers” and is verbally cognate with “atlantis,” (the name given to the more prosaic “Galt’s Gulch” in the novel) the name of the mythical city intended to counter Plato’s conception of the ideal society in The Republic. “Rand's choice of Atlantis as a symbol for her utopia of liberated producers may also be directed in part against Plato. The first recorded reference to (and probably invention of) the legend of Atlantis occurs in Plato's dialogues Timceus [sic] and Critius, where Atlantis is explicitly introduced (TimWus 17c-27b; Critics I I Oc-I 14c) as the enemy of a city organized along the lines of Plato's Republic-thus making Atlantis the original anti-Platonic society' (…Plato identifies Atlas as the first ruler of Atlantis: Critius 114a).”[7] Rand considered Plato to be “the godfather of Communism.”[8] It is also most noteworthy that the brother of Atlas was Prometheus (who sided with Zeus in the rebellion against Cronus), the one sentenced, because of offenses (stealing fire from the gods and giving it to men) to Zeus, to be chained to a rock in the Caucasus as bait to the scavengers and have his liver picked over daily. This mythology about the suffering of heroic rebels against the tyranny of the gods is a common theme in the ancient mythological world. Out of this matrix of mythology and historical development in the West an immortal (almost) title was born. And a massive following through 55 years and counting continues to make the title profitable and compelling.