Biblio Worms: February 2009

Feb 26th 2009 from The Economist print edition

The economic bust has caused a boom for at least one author

BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. “The Reader”, the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.
Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book’s 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the book’s ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama’s popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.
Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news. The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.
Whenever governments intervene in the market, in short, readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking site: “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life”. The group, and an expanding chorus of fretful bloggers, reckon that life is imitating art.
Some were reminded of Rand’s gifted physicist, Robert Stadler, cravenly disavowing his faith in reason for political favour, when Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Rand’s, testified before a congressional committee last October that he had found a “flaw in the model” of securitisation. And with pirates hijacking cargo ships, politicians castigating corporate chieftains, riots in Europe and slowing international trade—all of which are depicted in the book—this melancholy meme has plenty of fodder.
Even if Washington does not keep the book’s sales booming, Hollywood might. A film version is rumoured to be in the works for release in 2011. But by then, a film may feel superfluous to Rand’s most loyal fans; events unfolding around them will have been dramatisation enough.

A couple of months ago, I decided to go back to see if there were any patterns in short passages I'd marked in Atlas Shrugged. Funny I should go back to my handwritten notes today to translate into this post - just picked up this week's "Economist" out of the mail - and the cover reminded me so much of the book: a rusted, padlocked gate, sickly green background sky, and the cover story title: "The Collapse of Manufacturing."

The patterns I discovered were both mirrors of today's society and some things I've been mulling in my own private universe. So by way of having missed the discussion, here are the short passages I marked:

Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with its fingers sunk into the soil and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightening struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside--just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.

Years later he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain, or fear. But these had never scared him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal--the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked into the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.

p. 13

... watching them, Dagny thought suddenly of the difference between Francisco and her brother Jim. Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted nothing to remain great.

p. 94

...there's nothing of any importance in life--except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only symptom of morality that's on a gold standard...

p. 98

She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.

p. 107

Whenever she saw him in the office, she thought of his hands as she'd seen them on the wheel of a motorboat: he drove the business with the same smooth, dangerous, confidently mastered speed. But one small incident remained in her mind as a shock: it did not fit him. She saw him standing at the window of his office, one evening, looking at the brown winter twilight of the city. He did not move for a long time. His face was hard and tight; it had the look of an emotion she had never believed possible in him: of bitter, helpless anger. He said, "There is something wrong in the world. There always has been. Something no one has ever named or explained." He would not tell her what it was.

p. 108

He told himself that he had to attend the party--that his family had the right to demand it of him--that he had to earn to like their kind of pleasure, for their sake, not his own.

He wondered why this was a motive that had no power to impel him. Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically. What was happening to him? -- he wondered. The impossible conflict of feeling that which was right--wasn't that the basic formula of moral corruption? To recognize one's guilt, yet feel nothing but the coldest, most profound indifference--wasn't it a betrayal of that which had been the motor of his life-course and his pride?

p. 126

He saw the article, "The Octopus," by Bertram Scudder, which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public--an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without proof necessary.

p. 134

... I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anyone's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not.

p. 140

If you consider that for thirteen years this institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which I believe is not as good as the old ones-- you can imagine what the public response will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful.

p. 180

It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them--so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age.

p. 258

They drove through small towns, through obscure side roads, through the kinds of places they had not seen for years. Days passed before she realized what she missed most: a glimpse of fresh paint. The houses stood like men in unpressed suits, who had lost the desire to stand straight: the cornices were like sagging shoulders; the crooked porch steps like torn hemlines, the broken windows, like patches, mended with clapboard.

p. 263

There was no action she could take against men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality.

p. 280

Rewards were based on need, and the penalties on ability.

p. 301

... they made the kinds of fortunes they had dreamed about: fortunes requiring now competence or effort.

p. 325

He did not know whether the impossibility of acting had given him this sense of loathing or whether the loathing had made him lose his desire to act.

p. 347

Money is the barometer of society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed.

p. 383

Why speak of rigid, unbreakable laws? Our modern laws are elastic and open to interpretation according to circumstances.

p. 581

People would not employ a plumber who'd attempt to prove his professional excelllence by asserting that there's no such thing as plumbing--but, apparently, the same standards are not considered necessary in regard to philosophers.

When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought--it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind.

p. 680

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest--but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

p. 931

... all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others .. that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and on borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay.

p. 933

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth--

p. 939

This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of of truth. You are asked to sacrifice you intellectual integrity, your logic, your standard of truth--

p. 943

... you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe.

p. 978

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindlessness in those who have never achieved ... Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is in an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your spark be put out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.

p. 979