Clash of Titans

by Tom Pratt

  What was this Socialism that Marx trumpeted? What must be done now (in 1848 when he wrote the Manifesto) so that a better world will one day dawn? He and Engels called for a ten-point program: abolition of private property, heavy progressive or graduated income tax, abolition of all right of inheritance, confiscation of property of emigrants, centralization of credit in the hands of the State, centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State, extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State (along with reclamation of waste lands by the State), equal obligation of all to work, combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries and the gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, and the free education of all children in public schools. All of this was to be increasingly placed under the direction of an authoritative Administrative State.

  Marx also contended that Capitalism was inherently class based, and that these class barriers, like the ones from the Middle Ages, could not ultimately be breached. The proletariat (workers) would remain the proletariat while the bourgeoisie would remain entrenched in their protected perches, enjoying the privilege and luxury of generational profits. This was un-reform-able in Marx’s view, and the intractableness of this fact would be the key to the eventual rise of Communism. Class conflict was one of the keys to future utopia, and focusing on such conflict in his writings was important to him in order to trumpet it to anyone who would hear him. Urging for class conflict to accelerate would be one of the keys to bringing about a just system.

  Marx was not completely negative toward entrepreneurship. The Free Market system, in Marx’s view, has the ability to be a very powerful economic system because it is constantly improving the means of production. It can do this because of the advances in technology and because it has so much surplus value to work with. Marx expected, though, that a crisis would come upon Capitalism when profits would eventually fall even as the economy was growing. One crisis would eventually become many separate crises, and the resulting trauma would in the end collapse the system when the proletariat, out of frustration, would eventually rise up and wrest the means of production from the hands of the bourgeoisie. “The worse things got, he reasoned, the better the odds of revolution.” Marx and Engels argued that this eventuality was “inevitable.” “Workers of the world, unite!” And unite they did in the world of Ayn Rand’s childhood. What caused her such frustration as she came to understand the USA to which she migrated was the apparent rapid drift of her new homeland toward the tragedy she had left behind.

  We note, finally, in this intellectual primer the importance of Nietzsche to Atlas Shrugged. Like Marx, he was a Prussian. Also like Marx, he was an atheist, and a particularly virulent one. He was also an advocate of the idea that each generation produces a very small group of truly remarkable men, and that these men should be allowed unfettered access to the means that will display their greatness, unhindered by government or religion. He harked back to the figure of Prometheus as an example of that. He thought of that figure, who gave fire to humankind, as a “titanically striving individual,” who through a sacrilegious act of defiance against divine authority, makes “the sublime idea of active sin . . . the truly Promethean virtue.”[79] Rand was influenced by the cult surrounding Prometheus, and especially Nietzsche’s version of it, and key figures in the novel are clearly modeled after this. At one point in her philosophical pilgrimage she adhered to a more elitist take on her heroic figures—that is, that the masses of humanity could not be expected to achieve a rational existence like the Nietzschean Ubermensch. After she came to America and became involved in democratic politics, she became persuaded that there was a vast middle ground of those who were not the few who could influence the entire context of civilization for good, but neither were they mere pawns to be manipulated by the muscle men at the other extreme—men and women she saw as millionaires in cahoots with political looters. In other words, she came to trust the institutions of American democracy, but Atlas Shrugged is a loud warning about a course she saw as in progress and inimical to democratic capitalism.

  Chapter 14 - Who Is Jesus Christ?

  Ayn Rand consciously cast herself as opposed to religion, especially Christianity for two reasons: “it established unrealizable, abstract ethical ideas that made men cynical when they fell short,[80] and its emphasis on faith denied reason.”[81] Further, she said of Christianity that it “is the best kindergarten of communism possible.”[82] It was this conviction that led her to seek out an “ethics of individualism” that did not require the sanction of Christianity. She mused in her journal entries during the Thirties about the nature of man in the Nietzschean mold (as we have discussed it above) and his ability to achieve complete mastery of his emotional makeup through reason, thus becoming truly man as he should and must be to live with reality. Could such a man arrive at an acceptable ethical system that was primarily individual and naturalistic, or was ethics only to be achieved as a social conception and derived in some degree at least from Christianity (in the sense of coming from God)? Could the tendency to emotional rather than rational processes (generally contradictory rather than harmonic) be seen as a “form of undeveloped reason, a form of stupidity?”[83] Rand was not the first, nor will she be the last to wrestle with the nature of man in Adam as the Bible presents him. John Galt rejected the biblical construct in his speech as absurd and insulting because it required a mystical faith that required one to posit another reality with which one could not truly grapple directly by means of cognitive ability. “Original Sin” was supposed to be the acquiring of cognitive ability, rationality, the ability to think. The concomitant parts of the new reality were work and creativity and sexuality. These things make man (and woman) human, what he and she are in the reality that can be known to reason. In the Randian system this cannot be “sin,” some fatal flaw, since to be in this state is to find only death, not life. To attempt to live in this current reality of rational “benevolence” on the basis of premises gleaned from a mystical “reality” is to court death as the only end of such existence. It is, therefore, a morality of death. At least she was dead-on in part of that conclusion. One must determine the nature of reality to live in it, rather than to die in it. Aristotle’s three propositions rule in any rational universe.

  Hugh Akston taught his three brilliant students and admonished Dagny Taggart at one point (or more) that when your formulations don’t fit reality you should “check your premises.” According to this philosophical axiom it is not evil to be mistaken in knowledge. Evil is the willful attempt to fake reality and seek to convince others of the validity of such humbug. But just suppose the premise of “original sin” does in fact explain reality as we rationally apprehend it. What then? How shall we explain man as self-destructive and apparently incorrigible when it comes to reason? More to the point, what if reality has been altered by the very presence of this flaw in Man? What if the “benevolence” Rand saw in the universe is not just that it is rational, but that it is designed by a Creator who wishes to be “found” or better, “finds” us? If the universe is rational and man is capable of reasoned and accurate inference from the knowledge base available to him,[84] what accounts for death in an otherwise life-oriented system? Rand’s system in effect says that all of life is a struggle, and if one does not reach the pinnacle of aspiration before death, the struggle itself is worth the trouble. That really isn’t far from the street philosophy: Life is tough and then you die!

  We would submit that contrary to John Galt the real culture, morality of death is the objectivist one of Ayn Rand, for it cannot account for death itself in the current reality, and worse, it cannot posit a way out of death into life. The best it can offer is the amelioration of present circumstances toward a “better” existence materially, culturally, and politically, but it does not change the context of death. It remains true, “It is appointed for man to die once” (Heb 9:27 ESV), not only as an axiom of Christian Scripture but undeniably as a dat
um of simple observation in human reality.[85] One does not need a received text to know this as an Aristotelian premise. But one can also argue from some observed phenomena that this reality produces violence toward the innocent and among the would-be dominators in world history. World literary documents from ancient times to the present show men and women vying for supremacy, not of the mind but of the physical realm of existence, with the outlier possibility that immortality will somehow follow. They do not seek to persuade so much as they plot and threaten and murder and otherwise do violence individually and corporately, and they do it regardless of the manner in which they are repeating the folly of the past, to which they are privy. They accumulate knowledge, but it does not lead to the cessation of violence and fraud. They simply become more sophisticated in its application, such that the twentieth century was the most destructive of human life by human beings in the history of the planet. The culture and morality of death reach into the womb for millions of victims and into the retirement communities of the elderly and the hospitals of the supposed “healers” and commit murder for the sake of convenience and the avoidance of the costs of prolonging life. What claims to be about improving the “quality of life” has death as its tool and goal.

  The category of “stupidity” does not fit such a climax to the age of “enlightenment” and “reason.” The term “evil” fits very well. We would propose that mankind has “reasoned” that death awaits everyone anyway, so what difference does it make if some die prematurely by violence so that the lot of others, particularly the “others” to which we are attached and committed, is improved. Or, as in the case of the myths of ancient legend and epic poetry, wouldn’t it be better if one might die in a heroic struggle rather than supine submission to either fate or the “will of the gods.” The Bible has just such a story in its early chapters. Genesis 5 records the apparent death by natural causes of a number of long-lived descendants of Adam. It then records in the beginning of the sixth chapter that there were heroic figures who “took” as they wished from among their inferiors what appear to be “trophy wives”[86] and assumed the position of “giants” and/or “heroes.”[87] Then the comment is made that God saw into the heart of mankind and noted that the entirety of his inner considerations and commitments was “only evil continually.” Ultimately a flood of cataclysmic dimensions destroys everything but one family of 8 people. They find “grace” in the eyes and dealings of God with them and survive. Out of this experience comes the biblical maxim called the lex talionis, a concept that evil must be curbed and punished by the hand of man standing in for God, and the punishment must fit the crime (Gen 9:6). Most commentators believe this is the foundation of governments among men that supersedes the rule of “heroic” despots and petty chieftains.

  This story also asserts another factor that mitigates against the incorrigible inner propensity and devising of evil “continually”—man is created in the “image of God,” the reason man’s blood should be “shed” in legal punishment. To summarize the early biblical picture, man has been created in the image of God, but no matter how long he lives (even a thousand years?) he doesn’t get it right and degenerates into violence such that a divine judgment is necessary, but “grace” continues the story by rescuing some out of the cataclysm of the flood. What has led to this reality? It is what Galt labeled and theologians have called “original sin”—the fact that man has “fallen” from an original state of innocence into a state of exile from the pristine conditions into which he was first placed and the fellowship he had with his creator. What was that sin? Well, it was not the acquisition of reason and intellect, the ability to think for himself. He had that as part of the image of God. It was not sexuality, for the creator saw him as man alone and said “Not good!” and “built” him a “helper” of “corresponding” attributes to facilitate their becoming “one flesh.” It was not the ability to do creative “work,” for that was part of his commission in the Garden. What then was the first sin? It was seeking to be autonomous in a specific way—“the knowledge of good and evil.” It was not merely seeking to understand and know what good and evil is about. It was seeking this knowledge apart from the discovery of it in fellowship with God. This clearly subordinates man to God with reference to differentiating morality, but in the context of Genesis it is also an overarching designation for the entire creative enterprise and what is intended for man in it. The book itself closes with the declaration of Joseph to his brothers, “You meant evil against me but God meant it for good” (Gen 50:20 ESV).

  After the great flood we now see mankind in the light of two factors that are intended to explain his ongoing condition and experience: (1) He is created in the image of God (2) His inner intentions are continually evil. Nevertheless the world goes on and gradually the narrative unfolds revealing God’s means of remedying this dichotomy. Rand was correct to posit that man must fight for a unity of nature against some force that constantly tears him apart. Nevertheless, as she asserts, it cannot be that man is separated in his essential nature. He IS a “living soul.” He does not merely HAVE a soul, or spirit. His mind, his reason, his consciousness, his self is single, both physical and spiritual (in the sense of non-physical). This much she and Galt get right, but they do not take into account as serious the other possibility to explain why man is self-destructive and apparently inured to reason as an ethical and moral guide. What if the premise of “original sin” is correct. What if the entire universe is so geared in its essential nature that moral failing on the part of man sets it on a course of destruction? If, as the Genesis narrative claims, man was made the ruler of creation as the viceroy of God, is it not possible that within that framework of reality it makes sense that moral failing has consequences far beyond the mere “stupidity” of one pair? The biblical reality says that man’s moral failing has put the whole creation out of joint so that not only is man throughout his generations corrupted, but the world has been turned into a place of toil and futility in the very thing the original pair were placed here to do. Paul put it this way on both counts: “in Adam all die” (1 Cor 15:22; cf. Rom 5:12), and “the creation was subjected to futility” (Rom 8:23). Furthermore, the Apostle Paul says that there is a reason for the apparent “stupidity” of men and women: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom 1:21 ESV).

  We contend that this explanation of the condition of human life on this earth comports with the apprehension of it that comes from rational observation. Rand herself paints the characters who actually betray and (devilishly?) oppose the “men of the mind” as completely unsympathetic near-savages at times. They are brutish and ugly and worthy of overflowing disdain. In part this reflects Rand’s experience in the Soviet system and the disdain she received in intellectually elitist circles of the left in this country. They seem to us to be far more than lacking in understanding or knowledge, and she does call them “evil.” But from what does that evil stem? She would say they have been improperly taught and influenced by the descendants of shamans and witchdoctors who passed along a heritage of mysticism and superstition to the Medieval scholastics and Christian theologians. Without commending any theological framework beyond our previous analysis above, we suggest a check of premises. What if the biblical premise is correct and Rand’s is short on knowledge? What is the answer?

  Man needs more than an education and a reorientation to reason in his inner life. He needs what the Bible calls “salvation” from his condition and a renewal of the image of God along with the renewal of the entire Creation. Most of all, death must be abolished as a destination. How can this be accomplished? The biblical narrative points to Jesus Christ, the central figure of history, especially in his death and resurrection on this earth. The Old Testament anticipates his arrival by pointing again and again to the failure of humans and their institutions to set things right on earth. The New Testament reports the hi
storical events surrounding his first entrance into and exit from our human situation and then goes on to interpret for us the meaning of those events. Throughout this explanation there is the continuing theme that he shall return to finish what has begun in those events—the creation of “a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13).

  What is the meaning of his death and resurrection? It is the fulfillment of the ancient system of “sacrifice,” perverted among the many nations of the world as attempts to placate and appease the gods with offerings that will win favor for family and business and empire, but carefully presented in the Old Testament as the satisfaction of justice for the sins of the nation and the personal confessions of the individual sinner. The victim, an animal, enters death in the place of the nation and the individual so the sinner(s) may continue to live and have fellowship with God, who, by the way, has no need of “offerings.” These “sacrifices” by their very nature could not suffice to pay for the sins of people made in the image of God. One who is also in that image must come and offer himself as a spotless sacrifice, bearing away the wrath of God against sin and making a way for man to go on living in fellowship with God rather than descending forever into a pile of particles blowing on the wind. How does the Bible show us that the man crucified in the middle of a tri-partite execution somehow died a death that was different from the other two? The one in the middle came out of the grave three days later and was seen over a period of 40 days by several hundred witnesses on the earth and ascending through the skies to the heavenly realm. He was also seen and heard by three men in the heavenly realm—Stephen, Paul, and John the author of Revelation. Once again Paul gives the sense of what this means: this One was “declared to be the Son of God with power…by His resurrection from the dead” (lit., “from among dead people” Rom 1:4).[88] The meaning of this event is that what Jesus did satisfied the justice of God (Rom 3:23-26) and made possible the presentation of Jesus Christ as the Savior and Lord of sinners who come to Him in faith and follow Him in discipleship.