Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Atlas Shrugged movie — first reaction

As someone who read and loved the book, this movie totally worked for me.

Schilling’s Dagny is intelligent, emotionally expressive, and beautiful. Bowler’s Hank Rearden is equally intelligent and competent, with occasionally bemused, understated humor and equally occasionally understated anger. And the sexual chemistry between the two — yes, indeed.

Wisocky is tone-perfect as that bitch, Lillian Rearden. The casting of Marsden as James won me over — he could be good-looking, but his inner Jim-Taggart character weasels out and undercuts his potential.

Rand’s original novel is philosophically principled and stylized romantically, so it grates on the nerves of those who are intellectually opposed to a free society and/or who are emotionally cynical or neutered. For the same reasons, the movie will have its automatic opponents.

Also, the movie’s script is a highly essentialized version of the thematically jam-packed original novel, so I sense that the pace of the movie will be a challenge for those who haven’t read the book. (I’ll be curious to hear from those who only see the movie, though.)

Yet the movie is a very satisfying ride for those, like me, who know and resonate with the novel.

Looking forward to Part II.

Essay contest flyers for Spring 2011

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is sponsoring an essay contest for Rockford College students enrolled this semester in Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 103) and Business and Economic Ethics (PHIL 325).

Here are links are to the contest flyers:

Introduction to Philosophy topic: What is independence, and is it a good thing? [pdf]

Business and Economic Ethics topic: “What essential character traits and business skills lead individuals and organizations to succeed?” Reflections on Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, Atlas Shrugged, and Kaizen interviews with successful entrepreneurs [pdf]

The winners will receive cash prizes and be featured in upcoming issues of Kaizen.

Atlas Shrugged is really a documentary, datum #217

In the Atlas Shrugged chapter entitled “Wyatt’s Torch” (1.10), Rand has the increasingly desperate central planners pass the “Public Stability Law,” one provision of which states that “All the manufacturing establishments of the country, of any size and nature, were forbidden to move from their present locations.” In the novel’s collapsing economy, many companies are fleeing the over-regulated and -taxed states for relatively freer locations.

In Illinois, the Associated Press reports today that “Construction companies that want to work for Illinois government would have to promise not to move out of state under a proposal moving through the Legislature.” Desperate to cover its high spending and budget deficits, the state government of Illinois recently dramatically increased its personal and corporate taxes. As a result, major companies like Caterpillar are considering leaving.

Atlas Shrugged — the movie trailer

Marcel Duchamp and Lillian Rearden

Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was named most influential work of modern art of all time, according to a vote by 500 critics. Duchamp named it Fountain.

It was initially rejected for display at the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917, whereupon Duchamp’s allies argued that it was a worthy work of art along four lines:

“First, Fountain represented everyday American street culture. … Second, it is a work of art because an artist chose it, placed it in a gallery, and as a result made us see it differently. … Third, Fountain is an appropriate work of art in a country whose greatest art forms are, not painting and sculpture, music and literature, but ‘plumbing and bridges.’ … And finally—Duchamp’s American friends agreed—Fountain was beautiful in its chaste surfaces and sculptural form, reminding several commentators of a traditional Madonna or Buddha. (‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ was the title of one apologia.)”

The quotation is from Wanda M. Corn’s The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 48-49). Corn’s book is a good art history with an occasionally distracting postmodernist overlay.

(My interpretation of Fountain is toward the end of this short piece: “Post-postmodern Art” [pdf].)

Incidentally, Jerry Saltz, a senior art critic for New York Magazine, makes a strong connection between Duchamp and Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime in art. Writing in the Village Voice, Saltz says: “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger. Its presence is grace.”

Which connects us to these two challenging intellectual history questions: What is the connection between Kant and modern art? and Is modern art too complicated for us?

But here’s the sideways connection to the character Lillian Rearden, prompted by the “plumbing and bridges” reference in the quotation from Corn’s book. When we first meet Lillian in Chapter Two of Atlas Shrugged, the first words out of her mouth, as her steel magnate husband Hank Rearden arrives home, are “– but it’s just that a man of culture is bored with the alleged wonders of purely material ingenuity. He simply refuses to get excited about plumbing.” Of course, Hank Rearden produces much of the plumbing that Lillian disparages, and he is the designer of an innovative bridge over a Colorado chasm.

So: plumbing and bridges. Is it a coincidence that — of the thousands of items of modern technology that could have been mentioned — Rand chose the two Duchamp’s defenders chose?

America’s weird political lexicon

I’ve been browsing Anne Heller’s biography of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand and the World She Made came out last year, and I am late to the discussion.

I was stuck by this line about the New York City that Rand lived in while she was writing Atlas Shrugged. Heller writes:

“New York was such a politically liberal city in the 1950s that Saul Bellow described it as an intellectual annex of Moscow” (245).

Moscow at the time was the capital of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutally totalitarian nations of all time. The communists killed 62,000,000 of their own people, many in forced labor camps, and made life miserable for tens of millions more across many decades. Like the national socialist regime in Germany and the international socialist experiments in China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the Soviet Union is a disgusting stain upon human history.

But we call its apologists in the West liberals.

I am sure that historians a century from now will look back on our political language with puzzlement.

The increasing(ly clear) relevance of Ayn Rand

“Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life,” as this Facebook group points out.

Many intelligent observers have noted the connection, which has led to sharply increased sales of Atlas and prominent coverage of Atlas’s themes in Business Week, Forbes, the New York Times, the Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and other major publications. And from across the pond comes this British magazine’s tribute and commentary on Ayn Rand’s significance. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)

Amity Shlaes’s recent piece in Bloomberg is well worth reading: Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load. Shlaes is the author of a recent history of the Great Depression and so is well positioned to offer commentary on our times. A pair of key quotations from Shlaes’s piece:

On punitive taxation: “In 1986, a year when Atlas Shrugged sold between 60,000 and 80,000 copies, the top 1 percent of earners paid 26 percent of the income tax. By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and Atlas Shrugged sales were at 120,000. By 2006, the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.”

On government fiat money and deficit financing, quoting Rand: “Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

Today’s events are a consequence of political, economic, and, more importantly, philosophical principles adopted by the most influential thinkers and doers of the last several generations. The antidote, accordingly, requires that this and the next generation’s most influential thinkers and doers change their philosophical course.

For follow-up material on Rand’s philosophical analysis of the roots of the crisis and the antidote, I recommend the following.

For general readers, here is my introductory overview of Ayn Rand’s biography and ethics at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For all readers, here are two recent anthologies of essays on Atlas Shrugged, one edited by Professor Edward Younkins and the other edited by Professor Robert Mayhew.

For a technical, book-length discussion of Rand’s ethical theory, here is Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics. For further discussion of Professor Smith’s book, here is my review [pdf], published in Philosophy in Review, and Carrie Ann Biondi’s extended review [pdf], published in the most recent issue of Reason Papers.

For a philosophically-informed analysis of the crisis by a top-level financial professional, I recommend John Allison’s analysis. Allison is Chairman of BB&T and one of the great businessmen of our generation. Evidence: BB&T is one of the major banks that is still very healthy. Like Todd Zywicki, I recently heard Allison speak on the origins of the financial crisis and how BB&T avoided being sucked into the mess, and I recommend his analysis highly.

As we are suffering through yet another hard experiential lesson about collectivism and enforced altruism, let’s resolve to learn the lesson clearly and in principle so that the next generation will see more encouraging signs like these.