A Critical Review of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”

(Credit: User Deznal227 on hugelol.com)

Introduction

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand flips the idea of a “workers’ strike” on its head. Instead of the underprivileged, it is those whom Rand calls “the men of intellect” — industrialists, entrepreneurs, influential academics, successful artists and musicians — that go on strike. The social context for their strike is an America in which prevailing moral sentiments condemn industrial tycoons as heartless exploitative monsters; and consequently, incompetent bureaucrats gain obscene powers on a platform of heavy regulations and restricted private property.

It is not just the participants in this strike that makes it unusual. It is also unusual in its demands: it makes none. John Galt, the towering intellectual hero that convenes this strike, says that it consists of granting the demands of the prevailing sentiments: that it is immoral to be an industrialist. In complying with these judgments to their fullest, Rand’s heroes either retreat to an off-grid community in a valley in the Rocky mountains (known as “Galt’s Valley”), or hide in obscure, underpaid positions such as a railway worker. America, stripped of its productive geniuses, falls into disrepair and ruin.

Galt’s Valley is the flawless society manifesting Rand’s philosophy, which she describes in the afterwords to this novel as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”. Only the most competent women and men are allowed in this community; the currency is gold; the cardinal virtues are rationality, productiveness, and pride-in-oneself; and every person takes an oath upon entering: “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another mean, nor ask another man to live for mine”.

In describing this flawless society, and its negative image in the form of a “socialist” America, she built a system of philosophy, which later became known as Objectivism. She depicts humans as naturally having a “heroic” capacity to rationalize the world around them, to engineer the world to the benefit of their lives, and to obtain a deep sense of fulfillment in doing so. Competent people are those who recognize that this rationality is the principle tool for maintaining human life, and consistently use this rationality to bring value into the world. Incompetent people, on the other hand, evade this recognition and are constantly in a state of self-deception. If they are lucky, they manage to survive by the value produced by competent people; but if not, they perish against the forces of nature.

This leads us to Rand’s virtue ethics. A thing has value to someone insofar as that thing is a means to that person’s life. Life is variously defined at different points by Rand as survival in a form proper to a human being; survival qua human; or the achievement of happiness (eudaimonia). Rand’s ethics is therefore firmly teleological. Values are means to the final end, which is happiness or life; and virtues are the characteristics of humans that bring about values.

But this doesn’t mean that Rand’s ethics contain no categorical imperatives. On the contrary, Rand endorses Mill’s Harm Principle, and by extension, the right to private property. She claims to have solved the is-ought problem by reducing the concept of right (including the right to private property) to either the law of causation (1037, 1064) or the principle of identity (1061). Thus a correct understanding of reality, as it is, gives us the moral imperatives according to Rand.

Most strikingly, Rand claims that her theory of ethics is the only one compatible with the final end of life; and that all other conflicting theories — at least the prevailing moral sentiments in her novel’s America — are secretly (unbeknownst to their proponents) founded on death as the final end. That is why Galt’s strike needs not make any demands, and consists of literally granting the demands of those moral sentiments to their fullest: a society operating honestly on those principles is necessarily unsustainable, because the purpose of all activity in such a society is, secretly, to bring about death.

I will now examine each of these claims in turn.

Virtue and the Uncaused Cause

Rand’s heroes are human beings equipped with the virtues of Objectivism, namely: rationality, integrity, honesty, justice, independence, productiveness, and pride. Among these, rationality, productiveness, and pride seem to be the weightiest.

Why are these qualities virtues? Because, Rand says, they are means to the values which lead to the ultimate goal, namely, life. In particular, rationality is the ability to design plans to acquire values; productiveness is the ability to implement those plans; and pride is the ability to enjoy the fruits of those plans without a false conscience. Virtues, therefore, are not ends in themselves, but are instrumental to the achievement of life.

Let’s say I wanted to live a happy life. Then I would want to acquire these virtues. I apply Rand’s own principles of reason to the phenomenon of virtue. One of her principles is that everything happens for a reason: every event has a cause. What, then, is the cause for Galt’s virtue? In other words, what is the difference between Galt and Jim Taggart (a villain in the novel) that explains the fact that Galt possesses the virtues, but Jim does not?

The differentiating factor is either wholly out of the control of the character, or it is partly dependent on some choice made by the character. In other words, the question now is: does there exist some choice, made by the character, which becomes a necessary condition for the character’s possession of virtue? If not, then the possession of virtue is wholly out of the control of the character; and there’s not much for me to do other than hope that I was predestined to be virtuous.

On the other hand, suppose the differentiating factor partly depends on a choice. Consider, for example, the oft-repeated “talent + hard work” paradigm, where talent is out of one’s control, but hard work is a matter of choice. For Rand, the choice might go deeper. It might be something like: Galt chose to face reality as it is, whereas Jim chose to evade the responsibilities with which reality presented him. But this just kicks the can down the road: why did Galt and Jim choose these different choices? What differentiating factor caused the difference in choice?

This difference in choice either partly depends on some character-traits or dispositions inherent within the two characters, or is wholly environmental, meaning it does not depend on any property inherent in the characters. If it were wholly environmental, then the difference in choice is wholly contingent: if Galt was in Jim’s situation, he would have chosen as Jim did. If so, then there is not much for me to do, other than to hope that I was born into an environment that would induce me to acquire virtues.

Otherwise, the difference in choice partly depends on some character-traits or dispositions inherent within Galt and Jim. If so, then these dispositions are virtues; or at any rate, they play the same role as virtues do in our current task of finding the causes of virtues. We must then look for a causal explanation for the difference in these dispositions. Well, either this difference arose in a manner wholly out of the control of the characters, or it is partly dependent on some choice made by the characters at some prior point in time…

This cannot repeat ad infinitum, since people cannot make an infinite number of choices in their lives. So one of the following two options must be the case:

1. There exist some character-traits, dispositions, or virtues present in (the life of) Galt, but not in (that of) Jim; and this difference came about in a way wholly out of the control of the characters; or
2. The characters made some choice at some point in their lives, and this choice was wholly determined by environmental factors, meaning: if Galt was in Jim’s situation, he would have chosen the way Jim chose.

In both cases, Galt’s virtues and Jim’s vices are revealed as not their own doing. They are, in fact, totally dependent on random chances, on their talents, on the culture and climate into which they are born, and on the specific opportunities and challenges that arise in their lives through no choice of their own.

There is one way Rand can rescue her theory of heroic virtue from this causal analysis, and I suspect this is the way she would put it: she would reject the infinite regress at the point at which the characters made the choice — Galt, to face reality; and Jim, to evade. This choice, she will say, is neither explained by environmental factors, nor dependent on any character-traits or dispositions. Rather, it is a composition of environmental factors on the one hand, and of an absolute freedom on the other: a freedom exercised by Galt and Jim the moment they made the choice. This freedom is absolute in the sense that it is totally unguided: there is absolutely no guardrails to force their choices; no character-traits or dispositions play the final decisive role; not even the capacity of reason (for else it could be asked: why does Galt possess the capacity to reason, but Jim does not?) In exercising this freedom, the characters momentarily place themselves outside the realm of physical laws. But nor is the choice a kind of sheer caprice; for that would be indistinguishable from simple random chance. In other words, Rand would say: Galt and Jim chose differently, and there is just no causal explanation for this difference. It is a spontaneous bursting-forth of the will; it is an uncaused cause. This is the meaning of the titular “Atlas” that Rand either consciously or subconsciously implied.

But insofar as physical objects are concerned, Rand has told us multiple times of her deep commitment to the principle of sufficient reason: everything that happens, happens for a reason; to pretend otherwise is an evasion of one’s responsibility to reason about the universe. So, if she is also telling us that human beings, in exercising their power to make morally-relevant choices, act as uncaused causes; then she is committed to the view that the choice-making parts of human beings are in a different category of existence than material objects. But that would be a form of Cartesian dualism (or, at least, Sartrean-Cartesian dualism), which she has vehemently rejected.

Why does it matter that Rand’s theory of heroic virtue is inconsistent? Because one who sweeps aside the inconsistency in this theory, sweeps aside the need to face the uncomfortable truth that in a heavily industrialized, heavily privatized, heavily colonized society, neither the success of the successful nor the plight of the beggar are truly their own doing. As Michael Sandel points out in The Tyranny of Merit, the illusion that these are their own doing causes the successful to “inhale too deeply of their success”, and drives a violent rift between the haves and the have-nots.

From Reality to Rights

Rand claims to have solved Hume’s is-ought problem by deducing the non-aggression principle and the right to private property (which she regards as two sides of the same coin), either from what she calls the “law of causation” (1037, 1064), or from an application of Aristotle’s principle of identity on the concept of man (1061).

I confess to having utterly failed to make any sense out of her statement on page 1061 that the tautology “man is man” implies the existence of rights as “conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival”. If rights were part-and-parcel of the very concept of “man”, then it is deontic and non-reducible. But on the other hand, if rights arise merely as conditions of existence, then they are instrumental and will lend themselves to causal analysis. If Rand’s view of rights is deontic and non-reducible, then she has merely stated it, and has not really given a justification for it. But I suspect that she has merely failed to distinguish between these two possible views of rights, and implicitly leans towards the second, namely, the instrumental view of rights.

Therefore, the suggestion of deriving private property from physical causation is more substantial. One can trace its roots back to Locke’s Second Treatise, which obviously has an influence on Rand. Locke says:

“Though the earth… be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property” (Second Treatise Sect. 27).

Let’s call this the “simple causal theory” of private ownership: I own the land I tilled, because my labour, which is an extension of my body, has causally interacted with the land. But this cannot be the full picture of Rand’s theory of property. To see this, consider the following example.

There is a particularly hard patch of soil in the rocky mountains. Aaron, a grape farmer, invents a marvelous way of growing grapes on that patch of soil, and the wine made from those grapes taste nothing like other wine. Aaron begins to make profits in the millions, as bottles of his wine auction for thousands of dollars. Bob, an engineer, comes along and builds an indestructible tall fence around that patch of hard soil, everywhere maintaining a one-meter distance from Aaron’s land. He also equips the fence with a gate that automatically opens, via a clever mechanism, if Aaron deposits 10 dollars of cash through a metal slit into a large metal safe secured to the wall. He posts explanations of how to operate this gate all over the circumference of the fence, and posts a warning above the metal slit that says: “By depositing any object into this safe, you agree to transfer that object to the ownership of Bob”.

The simple causal theory would recognize the grape farms as Aaron’s property; but it would also recognize the fence as Bob’s property. Their labour has, without a doubt, causally interacted with these objects. The non-aggression principle would therefore forbid Aaron from destroying Bob’s fence. Of course, the same principle would not stop Aaron from climbing over the fence every time — but who would wish to do that while carrying tons of grapes, not to mention the farming equipment! By “preferring” to enter through the gate, then, Aaron would “agree to” give Bob 10 dollars each time.

This is obviously unacceptable to Rand: Bob’s actions are a form of looting, because Bob’s fence doesn’t produce any value on its own. It is only because of the values that Aaron’s grape farms have produced, that Bob is making any money at all. If Aaron’s grape farms were no good, Aaron would not bother to pay the money to go through the gates at all!

Rand is coherent enough to foresee this problem, and so she advocates a modified theory, one that I will call the “value instrumental theory” of property. In this theory, to say that one owns a thing is just a shorthand for saying that one has the right to do as one sees fit to that thing, as means for the end of “proper survival”. Property rights, therefore, consist of a right not to be interfered with when one uses a thing for one’s proper survival. But recall that “value” is Rand’s lingo for the way in which a thing is useful for the purpose of proper survival. So, strictly speaking, one does not own a thing per se, rather, one owns values that lie in the thing. In particular, among all the values that a thing may provide, one owns that portion of value which, but for one’s causal interaction with the thing, would not have been available.

We can see this at work in a passage in which Galt considers the steel mills of Hank Rearden, an inventor and steel tycoon. Galt says that, but for the genius of men like Rearden, the workers of his plant could only work in the same way blacksmiths in the Middle Ages worked, producing only one bar of iron every few days. Therefore, the difference between that measly bar of iron, and the thousands of tons of steel poured out in Rearden’s plants, is the portion of the value owned by Rearden. Consequently: “the standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your [the workers’] muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden” (1064).

The obvious problem with this view of property is that it seemingly ignores interaction effects in the causal relation between labour and value. Even if it were true that without Rearden’s intellectual labour, the production of his workers would be constrained to hand-forging iron (which is an outlandish claim in itself), we can still ask: but for the labour of the workers, how much value would Rearden’s intellectual labour bring about?

Judging from Rand’s description of Galt’s valley, which is an entire town built from the ground up by the sole manual power of a group of billionaires, intellectuals, musicians and actresses, we can guess that Rand’s answer to my question is: quite a lot! Even without workers, Rand thinks Rearden could still build a small furnace operating at a decent capacity to serve a community. This is a claim that shows Rand to be utterly divorced from the reality of 20th century industrial capitalism. But it is a claim crucial to Rand’s theory, for otherwise she could not justify her claim that an entrepreneur’s ownership of his/her business is a natural, rather than social fact.

A more modern-minded reader might object: “but Rearden doesn’t need to be able to physically build the furnace. The point is that, even if all of his workers were to disappear one day, he would still be able to replace them by hiring other workers; but if Rearden was to disappear (as he did in the novel), the workers would not be able to replace him by finding another entrepreneur to guide them”. But this cannot be what Rand meant. Recall that Galt asserted that, but for Rearden’s intellectual labour, the productivity of the workers would have been reduced to that of a medieval blacksmith. Therefore, the “but-for” clause excludes not just the particular labour that Rearden himself did, but also any potential labour of a similar kind (namely, intellectual effort in the industry of metallurgy). By the same token, to calculate the value that would have been available but-for the labour of the workers, we must exclude not just the particular labour done by these particular workers (which can be replaced), but all potential labour of a similar kind.

Indeed, Rand would have found it very strange if what links Galt to the value of his legacy was the fact that it is hard for anyone else to achieve the same thing, or that it is hard to replace Galt with any other, less charismatic, person. No, Rand would say that what ties Galt to his legacy is, simply, he did it. Rand thinks he is rightly credited with that value, not because his virtues were somehow set-apart above others in a “market” of virtues, but because, as a simple physical fact, Galt’s actions brought the valley into existence. She says explicitly that, if many other persons like Galt existed, that would not in the least diminish the significance of his contribution. To subjugate that significance under a market of potential replacements would be, for Rand, a mysticism of markets.

So the response via replaceability is not available to Rand. Instead, Rand’s promise is to show that private property rights derive directly from the law of causation; and that argument is plagued by a fundamentally unrealistic view of physical labour on Rand’s part. Of course, some may disagree on that point, and argue that Rand’s view of physical labour is correct. After all, why shouldn’t billionaires, who are very intelligent people, be good at building houses? To that I will respond with a simple example: recall that while Dagny, the main female character, was in the valley, she frequently gazed longingly at Galt’s beautiful brownish-blond hair; yet not once did Rand mention any billionaire that became a hairdresser in the valley, nor any method for those in the valley to acquire shampoo. This detail was simply swept under the rug. How many thousands more random details of this kind have been swept under the rug? To believe that a group of billionaires and intellectuals are capable of building a town from the ground up, without the help of the proletariat, is to commit the same error as believing that the proletariat of 20th century China could simply overthrow the bourgeois and the elite without themselves perishing into starvation: the heroic romance ignores the myriad details of modern industrial life, and the deeply entangled interdependence relations of labour induced by those details.

Either With Us or Against Us

Lastly, I wish to discuss Rand’s notoriously polemical style of writing. In describing the alleged views of her philosophical opponents, Rand frequently uses vague words such as “you”, “they”, and “he”, coupled with derogatory epithets such as “dim-wit”, “savage”, “shrieking gremlin”, to refer to those opponents. But she is very reluctant, in almost all cases, to actually identify the school of thought, movement, or philosopher she is talking about. In that way, she is reminiscent of that thinly-veiled racist refrain: “you people”. What is the effect of this technique?

This method of writing allows her to cherry-pick strawman versions of each school of thought with which she disagrees, mesh them all together into one big target, and easily refute them here-and-there as if they were all just one monolithic philosophy. The schools of thought that have become fodder in her masturbation-sausage include, but are not limited to: political conservatism, socialism, marxism, postmodernism, utilitarianism, Cartesian dualism, neoplatonism, and anarchism. As anyone can see, this is a confused hodge-podge of varying views that scatter along the entire spectrum of contemporary philosophy, and so it is senseless to attack them as if they were one big philosophical movement. Even if Rand’s understanding of each of these schools of thought was correct (which is not the case, since she frequently uses strawman positions to misrepresent an entire school of thought), her successful argument against the conjunction of all of them would merely prove that these school of thought cannot be all true simultaneously — which is obvious!

But such an approach to argumentation has immense appeal to the self-righteous, self-pitying part of our psyche. I often find myself complaining that “there are only three kinds of drivers in the world: crazy drivers, who drive far too aggressively; stupid drivers, who drive much too meekly; and I myself”. As one can guess from this, I am a pretty bad driver myself. In the same way, Rand makes sweeping generalizations of all philosophies that disagree with her, categorizing them into what she calls “the mystics of spirit” and “the mystics of muscle”. In so doing, she creates a magical space at the tip of a triangle (that of her own philosophy), in which a reader can comfortably insert himself, projecting the problems of his personal world onto the problems that Rand claims to have identified in modern America. Under the influence of this technique, it is too tempting to renounce the effort of serious philosophical inquiry, and settle for the more comfortable position of self-righteousness and self-pity.

These methodological problems notwithstanding, a case can be made that her polemical style of writing is consistent with her view of the role philosophy plays in practical life. All characters in the novel, whether heroic or villainous, are presented as acting according to some implicit philosophy. The heroes such as Dagny and Rearden were acting in accordance with Galt’s philosophy all along; they just didn’t know it at the beginning of the novel. Similarly, the villains that Rand calls “the aristocracy of pull” (whom we would today call crony capitalists) are acting, implicitly and unknowingly, according to the “mysticism of muscle”; and finally the “meek” villains such as Rearden’s mother are acting unknowingly according to the “mysticism of spirit”. It follows, then, that Rand thinks that to hold mistaken philosophical beliefs, however abstract that philosophy and however unconscious that belief, will lead to disastrous consequences. So Rand herself feels an urgency in convincing others of her philosophy.

As a side point, let me note that according to Rand’s own ideals, this convincing should not come at the price of argumentative rigour. During Dagny’s one month in Galt’s valley, Galt and his friends emphasize again and again that they do not want to force Dagny to join them, nor do they want to persuade her by any means other than pure reason. Instead, they want her to come to the conclusion by herself, by means of her own rational mind. The rigour of inquiry, then, should not be sacrificed regardless of the practical importance of conveying a point. Rand fails to live up to her own ideals. Which is fine. Nobody does.

Returning therefore from Rand’s ideals to the fact of Rand’s book: if Rand saw fit to denounce all philosophical views incompatible with hers as either a “mysticism of spirit” or a “mysticism of muscle”, and to claim that both of those mysticisms are ultimately “premised on death” rather than on “life”, what implicit philosophy underlies this writing? I suggest that it all turns on a view of “life” a.k.a. “proper survival” a.k.a. eudaimonia. Rand implicitly claims her view of “life” to be universal, ahistorical, and natural.

To be universal is to be uniform for all human beings, regardless of their personal circumstances such as race, ethnicity, gender, cultural background, etc. For example, the concept of “breakfast” is not universal, since each culture draws its own boundaries to separate breakfast from other kinds of meals, if they do so at all. But, for example, many mathematicians would hold the concept of an integer to be universal: what makes a number an integer in European culture is exactly the same as what makes it an integer in East-Asian culture — or so the claim goes. To be ahistorical is to be uniform regardless of history. For example, the concept of “fashionable clothing” is historical, since fashion trends change over time; but many Christians would view God as ahistorical, unchanging through time — or so the claim goes. To be natural is to not be contingent upon human intervention. For example, the laws of the United States are not natural, since they depend on the human society that creates and maintains them as laws; but Newton viewed the laws of physics as natural: although they carry immense significance for humans, but they are not up to humans; they are as they are regardless of human intervention.

Just as Chomsky argues in his linguistic work that there is some system of grammar underlying all human language across all historical eras, and that this system of grammar is somehow not up to us, that it is built into human nature; so Rand implicitly claims that there is a conception of life a.k.a. survival appropriate to human beings, which is true of all humans across all historical eras, and this conception of life is not up to us; it is built into human nature. She does acknowledge that humans, in the first instance, have the choice to “live” in this sense or to “die”. But once I have chosen life, it is no longer fully up to me what this life entails. It makes demands such as the securing of sustenance through productivity, and the achievement of happiness through self-esteem, which remain as demands whether I acknowledge them or not; and these demands are, in some structural sense, the same regardless of context and history: what makes a Honda useful to an American today is the same as what made a horse-drawn carriage useful to a Chinese merchant in the 7th century.

But in fact Rand’s selection of symbols betrays just how mistaken this implicit claim is. She frequently uses physical attractiveness (whatever is attractive for her, at any rate) as indicators of a good life. On Dagny’s first meeting Galt, she describes the “angular planes” of Galt’s cheeks, the “suntanned” skin, the “hardness, gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting” of his body, the “chestnut-brown” of his hair with shades from “brown to gold in the sun”, his “deep, dark green” eyes as of “light glinting on metal”; and then she proceeds to inform us that Dagny has grasped Galt as “a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception” (701–704). But why should I, who am Asian, perceive Galt’s virtue directly from his brown hair and green eyes? Why should I, whose principal mode of productivity involves technical thinking and computer programming, perceive Galt’s productivity directly from his lean muscles? The link between these physical properties and the virtues that Dagny “directly perceives” from them is nowhere to be found in the physical properties themselves. Rather, these links have been constructed by us, humans, through the slowly accumulating corpus of literature, films, and oral stories that we tell each other late at night in pubs. They are foundational myths maintained by us, maintained by means of the apparent synchrony of society. They are not natural; they are socially constructed.

On Dagny’s first reunion with Francisco after years of resentment, Rand describes him as having a “tall, slender figure” and “an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern”; she says that “he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind”; she describes his “gauntness”, “tight flesh”, “long legs and swift movements”, his hair which was “black and straight, swept back”, his suntanned skin which “intensified the startling color of his eyes: they were a pure, clear blue”. Finally, she tells us that “nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present, but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain, but to ancient Rome” (117). But it would be ridiculous to suppose that Ancient Romans perceived themselves as having these qualities, or to suppose that they would perceive any direct link between these qualities and the virtues that Rand will later assign to Francisco. Some of the thinkers most renowned in their own times in the Roman Empire, like the mathematician Hypatia, the philosopher Apuleius, and the theologian Augustine of Hippo, to give only three examples, are of Northern African origin, and would have been a far cry from Rand’s description of Francisco. Even Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s great founding myth of Rome, is from Troy, located somewhere in modern-day Turkey, and would have been understood to be of Asia-Minor origin. Rand’s figure of Francisco is, instead, a figment of what might be called the “the whitewashing of Greco-Roman antiquity” which took place between the 18th and 20th century, among the colonial powers of Europe and the slave-owning United States. This movement consciously introduced race into what it claimed to be a direct heritage linking the colonial powers back to antiquity, and attempted to use this fictitious idea to justify their modern version of colonialism. Rand’s vision of Francisco’s sense of nobility and virtue (afterall, virtus vera nobilitas) is anything but ahistorical; it falls dead-smack center into the snare of the historical process of ideas that she did not bother to overcome.

Lastly, the very transcontinental railway that serves as the cornerstone of Rand’s nostalgia for the brief period in American history when Galt’s ideology prevailed, is to most Asian Americans, a myth. The majority of the workers working on the western quarter of the transcontinental railroad were Chinese immigrants. They were paid half the wage of white workers, and had to live in tents and find their own food while their white peers, who did the exact same work as they did, lived in railway cars and had rations for meals. When these Chinese workers went on strike in 1867, their demand for equal wage was turned down; being stranded in the middle of nowhere, they had no choice but to comply with the tycoons. Throughout the building process, they were not given citizenship status. Following the completion of the railroad, anti-asian sentiments grew among US citizens, fuelled by economic and social tensions. This resulted in the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, which did not get fully repealed until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Over the period of a century, all immigration from China was barred, even though lawmakers knew that this would result in the permanent separation of the families of the very men responsible for the transcontinental railroad, the lifeline of the United States. This was an openly acknowledged sanction for hatred. Consequently, for many Asian American families, the legacy of the transcontinental railroad is not one of the “golden age”, but of the failed promise of America. It is a legacy of unequal pay for equal work, of the irrational self-righteousness of one immigrant ethnic group against another, of the flippant disregard for the right to the pursuit of happiness of an entire subpopulation, of the active attempt to erase their sense of self-esteem. Though the businessmen and the “men of intellect” who stood at the top of the railroad pyramid did, without doubt, have to take on immense risks and overcome immense theoretical difficulties; yet ultimately their achievements were fully dependent upon this breaking of the promise of America. In no sense, then, is Rand’s nostalgia for the alleged “American golden age” universal.

These are merely examples. If the meaning of Galt’s blond hair and slender figure is socially constructed; if the virtuous connotation of the Roman-ness of Francisco is merely a lingering hallucination of Rand’s own historical moment; if the capacity of the transcontinental railroad to serve as a signifier of the rational productivity of enterprising America is dependent on cultural context — just so is the family of all other symbols whose sum total constitute the meaning of Rand’s concept of “life”. Rand’s own effort to aesthetically construct the image of her ideal form of human life is a confession to the cultural-dependent, historical, socially-constructed nature of that ideal. If a philosophy contradicts her, then, she should not conclude that it is premised on “death”; she should consider the possibility that it simply takes into account a different reality of life, based on a different cultural, historical, social situation, of which she is ignorant. She should, in other words, check her premises.

References

Aristotle. Metaphysics VII.

Chang, Gordon H.& Fishkin, Shelley Fisher (ed.) The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Stanford University Press.

Lock, John. 1689. Second Treatise of Government.

Mill, John Stuart. 1859. On Liberty.

Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New American Library edition [2018]. New York: Penguin.

Rand, Ayn. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand. D. Harriman (ed.), New York: Plume.

Sandel, Michael. 2020. The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good? New York: Picador.