Thursday, 18 April 2013

Closing statements


The post below was the last of the many faces of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and so it's time to conclude this blog.

There's much that could be said about the book, and I'm sure you could find lots of discussions with a quick search online, so I'll try not to say too much. Besides, it's been well over a year since I finished the book so it's not exactly fresh in my mind. But after this long journey, it feels appropriate to sum up my feelings.

The philosophy

First I guess I should get the political/economic stuff out of the way. She is very right wing. I am pretty left wing. We were never going to see eye-to-steady, perceptive eye. There is one thing I'll say in her favour: she paints a convincing picture of very-large-scale industry – eg steel, oil, railways – as something very important to society, something society would collapse without. And yeah she romanticises industry, but she does a good job of it.

But apart from that, her whole philosophy – the one that apparently inspires a lot of right wing politicians – is well, very right wing I suppose. I don't like it. I mean, she has lots of components to her philosophy, things about reality and perception etc, but that's not really important, it's the moral and economic side of things that I take issue with. The way I see it, I have 3 fundamental problems with her philosophy:

1. She believes everyone should act in their own self-interest, and should be allowed to do so without hindrance. And you’re entitled to all the rewards that you might earn from doing so. You can’t really argue with this, either you feel this way or you don’t, and a lot of right wingers probably agree with it. BUT I think she (and no doubt other right wingers) justify this position by making out that it will benefit society as a whole. Which leads me to the point 2.

2. She’s not grounded in reality. She thinks that if the great minds are left to run business as they want, with all the market freedoms and competition that this should entail, everyone will benefit ie have houses, railways, food etc...but obviously that doesn’t happen in reality. She paints a picture of honest industrialists with good old-fashioned values of quality and sustainability, and the vast profits they make are only fair.

But oh, wait, that’s not what really happens when you have free-market capitalism.

Instead companies focus solely on making as much profit for their employees and shareholders as possible, and quality and any other consequences are somewhere lower down on the priorities list. To be fair, she wrote this in the 50’s, and maybe the effects of full-blown capitalism weren’t really happening yet, so I won’t blame her too much for that. But just because her system works in a novel – in a fictional world full of people hugely caricatured to fit her polarised views – that doesn’t mean it’ll work with real people.

Another classic right wing view she has is that if you work hard and succeed, then you’ve earned your money, and if you don’t, well, you deserve to be poor and starving. So obviously again, she’s not basing her philosophy in reality, and like many right wingers, doesn’t acknowledge that in the real world not everyone has equal opportunities.

Ok if I'm honest, it’s not something she explicitly addresses, at least not in Atlas Shrugged, but I get the impression that she's probably aware of unequal opportunities, but she just doesn’t give a damn. Leading me to the final problem....

3. She's a psychopath. Well ok that’s not a clinical diagnosis, maybe a more apt expression is ‘cold-hearted bastard’. If you’re intelligent, capable and driven, then you’ll succeed, and she’s very happy with that. What if you don’t get the chance to have a good education, or your parents don’t bring you up to be motivated? Or, to take a slightly less ambiguous picture, what if you’re just naturally stupid? Or what if you have a learning difficulty? Well, I think Ayn’s response would be: ‘tough shit’. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s the impression I get. I will point out at that, in one part of the book, hundreds of people die in a train accident, and Ayn basically says that, because none of those people buy into her individualistic philosophy, they had it coming. Again you can’t really argue with her, there’s no fundamental counter-argument to the ‘tough shit’ philosophy. But you would hope that it wasn’t the philosophy of the people who run your government....

And, for the record, she cheats. This is fiction, so she can give the characters whatever traits she wants. So the heroes of the book, the rich industrialists who share her values and ideals, are tall and handsome, fiercely intelligent, entirely rational, just a little bit witty and aloof, and always completely right. Meanwhile, the bad guys, the people who want to regulate the heroes and redistribute the wealth are, without exception, stupid, fat, irrational, bitter and corrupt. I’m not saying it’s coimpletely the other way round in the real world, but it’s kind of a cheap trick on Ayn's part.

So that’s what I have to say about her philosophy. No doubt there’s some really interesting questions to ask about, among other things, her position on women and feminism. To be honest it’s not something I paid that much attention to in Atlas Shrugged. I did read one discussion about a rape scene in the book between two of the main characters. I have to admit that it didn’t seem like rape when I read it – but if it was, she wasn’t portraying it as a bad thing. Either way, she definitely seems to like a bit of violence in her sex...and maybe that’s ok, as long as it’s all consensual...but it doesn’t help her image of being a bit of a psycho.

The book

This blog wasn’t meant to be about the philosophy though. It was, I suppose, aimed at gently teasing her writing style. To be honest, I actually thought Atlas Shrugged was a pretty good read, despite the length, and despite the long and rather boring rants she peppers through the book to put across her philosophy. This is not the height of literature by any means, but she was into writing and Hollywood films too, and she knows how to write a novel – the storyline is very interesting, there’s plenty of suspense, violence, sex and romance, and in some ways I actually quite like the language. And, after working on this blog, I actually started to notice the same facial stylings in other books. Take, for example, Shantaram (p286):
'They wore a faintly neurotic look of startled indignation.'

Ok, in terms of quality of writing I'd put Shantaram in the same category as Atlas Shrugged, but how about something from a classy affair like The Great Gatsby (p38):
'He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or give times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.'

Crikey.

UPDATE: as it so happens, this very same face is taken on by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio in the new film adaption of Gatsby. Who do you think does a better job, me or Leo?



So maybe we were being a little unfair on Ayn. Whatever.

Anyway, this wasn't as brief a conclusion as I'd planned, but it's a bloody long book, and I've just saved you reading the whole damn thing, so I make no apologies.

What next? Well perhaps more interesting than talking philosophy and economics would be to explore facial expressions more, psychologically, or in literature, or even how they're used in many, many different ways on the net. But that's for another time.

Thank you for allowing me to share my journey with you.

The end.

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

Page 1058

'Dagny noticed that they looked at each other as if their glance were the handshake of a bond too firm to require any statement. Rearden saw her watching them--and the faintest contraction of his eyes was like a smile of sanction, as if his glance were repeating to her the message he had sent her from the valley.'

Phew! This is the last one, and rises to the occasion! Very tough. I tried to get both expressions in there, it was enough to make me break a sweat.

Page 1049

'He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive.'

Page 1047

'The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance--and even he was able to recognise the nature in the sparkle of the dark green eyes: it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery'

Thursday, 24 January 2013

Page 1038

'She observed that there was no terror in their faces; she saw hints of it, but it looked like a perfunctory terror. Their expressions ranged from blank apathy to the relieved look of cheats who believed that the game could end no other way and were making no effort to contest it or regret it--to the petulant blindness of Lawson, who refused to be conscious of anything--to the peculiar intensity of Jim, whose face suggested a secret smile.'

Hopefully it's clear that I chose to go for the 'cheat' look here.

Page 1029 (3)

'When the image of Mouch held the screen, these faces were relaxed in bored contentment, which was not pleasure, but the comfort of license, of knowing that nothing was demanded of them and nothing was firm or certain.'

This was a pretty intense couple of pages. Lots of faces. All very significant.

Page 1029 (2)



'She saw a few faces who seemed to care. They were looking at Galt with a desperate plea, with a wistfully tragic admiration--and with hands lying limply on the tables before them.'

I may have been able to get my hands in this shot as well, but it would have been harder to get a good look at my face, and remember, it's the faces that I focus on in this blog. Don't worry though, I can assure you that my hands were lying limply on the table. I'm a professional.