Sorry, Justin, but a cameo in a thousand-page novel is
hardly enough to touch on such an important subject.

Considering the tendency of her characters to start on
long speeches and go on, and on, and on, the most
important subject of childraising gets dispensed with
in a few phrases, and at most one more choice to be
made.

I will have to say that in this point, Chambers was right.

Justin,
The long-delayed ending to “Atlas Shrugged” arrives
with the incineration of her opponents. Not the kind
of “literature” one expects to draw the admiration
of someone who works for peace. The hate just pours
off the pages of this book. Why the love for her and
her cult?

“…She opposed the mechanical materialism of the Marxists and others who carelessly subtracted consciousness from their view of human nature.”

Surely you mean “deliberately subtracted,” not “carelessly.” The Marxists were and are dispassionately barbarous, not stupid. Denying consciousness abjures humanity, and the “masses” are made cattle.

Cool Hand Luke ends with a dead prisoner and order in the prison camp.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ends with a dead patient and a runaway Indian.

What does any of that have to do with good old American literature?

It was moment in time when the actions of our enemies pushed compartmentalized post-modern artists, for better or worse, to dramatic responses, without falling for the nihilistic hedonism of existentialism.

Don’t like it fine, but why must ex-Commie’s front the “conservative” reaction? 

Was Atlas Shrug’s plot much deeper than a comic book?  Perhaps not, but then, Chambers probably thought the Commies at Mad Magazine and those horror comics doing nothing more than putting a conservative’s (Lovecraft) tales in print, were a threat to the youth of America, and meanwhile, John Wayne was filming absurd propaganda for escalating the war in Viet Nam.

And a childfree landscape is bad....?  Sounds like a perfect world to me.

Optimistically, but foolishly, I thought the Wicked Witch was buried in the previous debate. What does it take to make the author give up his battle against the windmills? A stake through a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged? Ritual burning? But then I’d have to buy a copy of the menace. No thanks. I think I’ll rather invest that money in some extra-soft luxury toilet paper. Will do more use and make me feel a lot better than Atlas Shrugged did.

I’ll never forgive the pricks who once told me how “great” this novel was. And I’ll for ever mourn the hours and days lost on reading it. Reading it was like being lured into going to a party with no chicks and no alcohol, but instead lots of religious intellectual gay guys.

The “great” in the novel never ever manifested. Maybe on next page? After that? Next again? But the monster never ended.

After reading it you felt cheated and dirty. You spent an hour or two sitting on the floor in the shower, crying and trying to wash away the dirt.

But let me end on a positive note. How about using Atlas Shrugged as a means of torturing those terrorists? Force them to read it, question them after each chapter and those who can’t tell what’s it all about would have to read that chapter again and again and again. That’ll make them talk. Someone would of course have to translate the ogre into Arabic first. Poor guy.

Ayn Rand’s value lies in her habit of turning conventional wisdom on its head, of questioning every cultural bromide she came up against. Her writing is often overwrought and could benefit from some good “objective” editing, but is still powerful in places. Whittaker Chambers’ review bordered on hysteria. The best thing to do with Rand is read her books with an open mind, and be willing to accept her often fascinating insights, while rejecting her sometimes embarrassing overstatements.

@Marley Greiner

A child-free landscape means that when the protagonists
die of old age, there is no next generation to continue
its work.

They end up a historic curiousity, just like the Shakers,
and completely unrelated to the way people live.

Anyone can posit a system. But a system that will
persist through the ages, growing, changing and developing,
ah, that takes children.

It is true that, as Justin says, dear Ayn expands on the
upbringing of Dagny Taggart, but the sense I got of it
is that she developed her values **in spite** not because
the way she was raised by her parents.

Which means that in each generation there has to be
a complete turnaround, led by those who educated
themselves in spite of their upbringing.

So you have all those populations through time,all
unconnected with each other, all without history,
except their knowledge that what their parents did
was all wrong…

No, I do not think that dear Ayn ever stopped to think
what is involved in child rearing.

“Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.”

He sounds like a paleocon worried about technocracy.

Chambers’ criticism strikes me as rather good:

“Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.”

Raimondo: “But of course there are children in Atlas Shrugged . . . This paean to the glories of childhood�or, rather, a certain kind of childhood�starts on page 784 of the hardcover edition and continues on to another closely-printed page” - Is this sarcasm?  I can’t tell.

Rand was an intellectual lightweight compared to Chambers.

Interesting.  All sorts of justly and unjustly famous works don’t delve heavily into child-raising or the lives of children.  How exactly is that a criticism of “Atlas Shrugged”?  I suppose Rand didn’t cover care for the elderly, pet euthanasia, or lust between same-sex people to any great extent either, and the intellectual response must be: So what?

I’ve read “The Fountainhead” and “Anthem” but not “Atlas.” With the kind of passion for and against it displayed above I’ll have to put it on my reading list, albeit far down.  Art is long and life is short, and all that.  If I do read it, I’ll have to follow Rin Tin Tin’s example and doggedly persevere.

The Fountainhead and Anthem are better litterary works than Atlas Shrugged, or at least less bad. I had the misfortune to start with Atlas Shrugged. It forever poisoned my perception of her other works.

Never has a novel been in greater need of a heavyhanded editor than what was the case with Atlas Shrugged.

Mr Gecko (played by Michael Douglas), in the movie Wall Street, expresses the whole idea of Atlas Shrugged in one short sentence: “Greed is good.”

The best critique of Ayn Rand (and right-libertarianism in general) is in the essay “Are you a real libertarian or a Royal libertarian?” at geolib.com slash essays slash sullivan.dan slash royallib.html

@R. Nelson

It is a criticism in that the raising of children is not
on the same level with pet euthanasia and same sex marriage
(a similar criticism can be made with the treatement of
elderly people, as age is somehting that will happen to all
of us - whether we want to think about it or not).

Too many systems suffer from the same problem, they pay
no heed as to whether whatever they are erecting will
go on for more than a generation. Unfortunately too many
of them have been men, and they thought that women raised
children and took care of the old, so they did not need
to worry about it.

But by the time Ayn came upon the scene, there was a
growing awareness of the importance of nurturing the
next generation in the way it should go, and then
cames Ayn who creates an utopia of thirtysomethings who
do not waste any time, in their creation extasies, to
think about the ends of life.

Nowadays any philosophy that does not note the fact that
we are born weak and dependent of others, reach maturity
where we are not only independent, but responsible for
other dependent people, and then after time, we become
dependent of others again is seriously incomplete.

Today on the Internet, if I were to compare someone to a Nazi, I would be greeted with sarcastic groans, and rightly so.  Yet National Review is proud to showcase a fifty-year old example of Nazi-Comparing—against a Jewish woman who advocated individual freedom.

“Which means that in each generation there has to be
a complete turnaround, led by those who educated
themselves in spite of their upbringing. “
No, Adriana, not a “complete” turnaround. Our forebears had some treasures worth retaining. After several decades of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, we’re left with a hollow, deracinated generation at the top whose grotesque delusion of discretionary reality has led us to compound disaster upon disaster.

Adrian wrote:
“Sorry, Justin, but a cameo in a thousand-page novel is
hardly enough to touch on such an important subject.
“Considering the tendency of her characters to start on
long speeches and go on, and on, and on, the most
important subject of childraising gets dispensed with
in a few phrases, and at most one more choice to be
made.”

Oh for goodness sake, get over your faux self-righteous
indignation. No author is obligated to spend X number
of pages on your favorite topic. As the father of a 2-
year-old---whom I endeavor to raise as a critically
thinking, discerning human being rather than an
overwrought emotional knee-jerk basket case like the
rest of the vacant-minded sheep---I recommend you go
in search of a novel wherein child raising is central
to the plot.

Or go write your own damn novel.

Just because you disagree with Chambers’interpretation
of Rand doesn’t make him a neo-con.  Yes, he was a
former commie convert to conservatism, but his was a
true and thorough 180 conversion. Read Witness, one of
the great books of the 20th century.  He left communism
as a result of not being able to accept the changing
Stalinist lines, one day against Hitler, one day for.
Once he came to accept objective truth, he came to
accept a Spiritual Reality underlying such truth.  So
he became, not only paleo-conservative/libertarian
critic of Big Government, but a Christian mystic, a
Quaker and a pacifist.  His war on communism was not
military, but intellectual, moral and spiritual. It
would only be won by fidelity to God-given precepts of
absolute spiritual truth. From his perspective as a
philosphical mystic, Rand is indeed an egocentric
materialist and,like Hitler, a radical social
darwinist who leaves little space for the Christian
values of compassion and community.

@Say What?

I was not the one who brought the issue of a childless
novel, but Justin who defended it saying that it did
indeed have children.  I say that one page out of a
thousand that is 0.1% of the total, which is meaningless
from a statistics point of view. That falls under the
heading of “experimental error” and cannot be advanced
to prove or disprove anything.

I am perfectly happy readiang novels without children
(my big guilty pleasure is reading the Anita Blake novesl
which can qualify as porn for women, but also have
vampires, werewolves, plus a few decomposing corpses.
Much guiltier than Keith Olbermann, for that matter).

But “Atlas Shrugged” was not offerd as a novel, but as
a philosophy which was “entirely self consistent” and
“the answer to everything”.  As for the self-consisntency
I cannot but recall Chesterton’s comment that a
madman’s delusions can be entirely self-consistent, and
adducing the consistency was as relevant as noting the
perfection of a circle, because that perfection did not
tell you how big or small the circle was.

If someone has “the answer to everything” then I expect
that when I want to discuss something that interests me,
that such person has something to say on the subject,
something enlightnening. If that person cannot bring
herself to discuss the theme, then I’ll ahve to say that
she has the answer to everything, except A, B, C, or D.
And that she may want to obviate the problem by denying
the existence of A, B, C,and D, or call them unworthy
of discussion.

Note: I remember reading her comment about “the little
autocrat of the Peace Corps spoonfeeding a baby”.  I
do not think that anyone before her equated feeding a
baby with autocratic tendnecies. I wonder what that
shows about her mental processes.

Sidney Hook favorably compared Witness to St. Augustine’s Confessions, with good reason.

A few years ago, on the recomendation of Ann Coultier
in one of her stupid tirades, I decided to procure a use
copy of Witness, just for laughs.  I was totally blown
away!  The book contains some of the best writing in
the English language, ever, period.  It is also a
nightmarish vision written at the one point in history
when the Soviet block might have actually judoed the
West into submission.  Chambers writes as if it is his
last will and testiment, expecting the knock on the
door at any moment.  Well, that was 1949, but the National
Review is culpable in a way that Chambers is not
with the yearly increasing benefit of historical
perspective.  Eventually the Soviet Union became
a joke...and now the neocons are down to bearded
fanatics hiding in caves as the dragon which is
threatening the valiant military industrial complex.
Chambers was an authentic voice of moral conversion,
but for his self proclaimed heirs from Ann Coulteir
to the National Review, it will always be 1949.  The
difference is that Chambers expected the knock at the
door, while they want to go a knock’in!

...I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss’s apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I like to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’ The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Though it pains me to side with National Review against my anti-war hero Justin Raimondo, I have to say that I love Chambers’ book “Witness” and I enjoyed this particular review. I have a hard time imagining Chambers at a “neo-conservative.” It should be noted that he had a falling out with Buckley and the NR crowd, and the only issue he really had in common with them was anti-Communism. The man portrayed in “Witness” (and subsequent posthumous biographies) is a sensitive devout Quaker who was an agrarian at heart (in love with the disappearing rural traditions). I can’t imagine him being as heartless as David Frum.

Rand said her definitive work was Atlas, so
if you haven’t read it, you haven’t read her.
Rand was Pro-Life, and the opposite of a neocon.
I feel sorry for people who limit women to
childbearing puritanism. Rand proved women can be more.
If she’d have been an unrepentant commie, she’d have
gotten a Nobel. It distresses me so many people want
to use her philosophy to justify unprovoked war,
partly, think, because they are too dumb to
understand her work, or too cynical to tell the truth.
To read Rand, you first have to read Plato, so if you
didn’t like her book, get the prerequisite background.

Rand showed that taxation is a form of involuntary servitude or slavery.  Her critics were careless, even mischievious, for not dealing with this moral principle.  After accepting the premise that taxation is a form of slavery, a moral person must become an abolitionist and seek to absolutely minimize taxes.