Progress and masculinity
by Newnameelizabeth
Chapter 3 of Atlas Shrugged is very painful to read because it is difficult to totally vilify technology and efficiency. If something is ineffecient, it is usually because of negative reasons such as poor construction, poor planning, or misguided goals. Rand goes too far in saying that nature is less efficient than technology. Slowness isn’t the only criteria for inefficiency. Tolkien provides the antidote for this mistake of hers, but even he gets impatient with the Tree Ents. Still, I can’t help but find this passage compelling:
“What she [Dagny Taggert] felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods: it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild flowers – but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.”
Manifest Destiny and Immanent Domain both seem tied to the above. There is something inevitable about “progress”, at least to the western mind. However stone age cultures quickly adapted when they were introduced to iron age tools. But they were content before that, and didn’t seem to sense the importance of progress.
The above passage also makes me ponder the idea that nature is feminine and progress is masculine. Villifying progress seems to vilify masculinity. Indeed, one might characterize the expansion of the railroad as rape. But does that make men in “uncivilized” cultures feminine? No, they exert their energies towards territorial disputes and raiding. The same characterization can apply there too. What is the difference between the Genesis command to “fill the earth and subdue it”, and that characterization? The former requires permission from the feminine first, I suppose. Can you ask a tree what it wants to be used for? I believe so, but it takes an artist and a poet to properly hear the answer.
And there is also the issue of communication, which is a very human and natural thing. We crave access and sharing, which technology makes easier. Too easy in some cases, I’m sure. But to be against it is to close oneself off and make oneself unavailable. One may not like the invasive nature of railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and highways, but even the pony express cut through Indian lands requiring the building of forts in the western frontier to protect them. White man’s communication trumped the preservation of Native American life. We should have befriended them and asked them to send smoke signals for us. And paid them for it. In higher technology?
This chapter also gets into international trade with Mexico. The argument for being our brother’s keeper is criticized very strongly. Again the vagueness of who our brother is is brought out. As is the amount of state control instead of free enterprise said brother is under. I believe in private property, so in that way I agree with Rand. But her heroes don’t come across as greedy, which I think is a side effect that needs to be addressed. They may say they only care about money, but their lifestyle is much more spartan. Resentment and envy is the greed of the less fortunate. Characterizing the less fortunate as lazy and inept sounds too harsh, but I wish the left would sound more like they valued hard work and that they believed laziness is a vice. Laziness and ineptitude alone do not account for poverty, however. There are tons of other variables in the equation. But to blame it all on rich people’s self-serving policies sounds too deflective.
first off, fill the earth and dominate were in context of our being caretakers, Adam was to tend the garden and keep it. not destroyers. Secondly, the idea of masculine and feminine is nonsense, and the so called masculine qualities of dispute and raiding are not masculine but ungodly, fleshly, evil. the so called feminine weaknesses of vacillation, deceptiveness and so forth are also fleshly. We have one model for both sexes, Jesus Christ, a male. in Genesis woman was taken out of Adam’s side and the alikeness is emphasized, the radical sex separatism developed AFTER the fall.
I forgot to mention, Rand was an atheist and her moral standards were contributory to the philosophy of some satanists, and are certainly compatible with them. cut and paste this entire url to get a bunch of articles that show how totally opposed Randianism and Christianity are, the first article notes they are two separate religions.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=ayn+rand+and+jesus+christ&oq=ayn+rand+and+jesus+&gs_l=hp.1.3.0i30l4j0i22l4.1286191.1290749.0.1293226.19.18.0.1.1.0.113.1580.15j3.18.0.les%3B..0.0…1c.HhH_dlVFixY
Does care taking include mining? And who owns the mines, the state, or private owners? It’s too simplistic to vilify everything Rand believed. I also believe there are masculine and feminine distinctions. I can’t speculate their nature before the fall.
Even though Rand wasn’t wrong in everything she believed, she believed it all wrongly.
Nobody likes drill sergeants.
It would indeed be stupid to totally vilify technology and efficiency, but what is needed is for these things to be scaled to human needs, and not utilize the populace as just an instrument to achieve greater degrees of technology and efficiency. Efficiency, like Progress, has to be predicated by some kind of goal, or the word is meaningless; the rational goal of all production is to sustain families and communities. If “efficiency” is emphasized to the point at which the vital interests of families and communities is being ground into the dust, then that is truly inefficient. Once again, I have to point out the question the Amish ask when the adoption of a novel technology is being considered, “What will this do to the life of our community”? We don’t, of course, all need to be Amish, but we all need to ask intelligent questions of this kind, and we tend not to. Probably to even begin to ask such questions, we would have to begin to resist the propaganda with which we are surrounded, much of which was devised to prevent such questions from being asked; this would entail a rather painful swimming against the current. It has been pointed out that there are no children in the systems devised by many modern social theorists, and in the case of Rand, one might almost add that there are no human beings, either.
P.S. When did Tolkien get impatient with Ents?
“What will this do to our community” is a good question, but the nature of humanity is not to agree. There are rules and stated goals, but there are always those who will want something different. How much should they be accommodated? Higher technology always seems to win out because it is usually more powerful. We are attracted to power. It gets out of control when coupled with greed. But who among us is not greedy? It all goes back to controlling our own passions, and to wait until everyone’s passions are controlled will take longer than an entmoot.
Apparently the movie has the hobbits convincing the ents to speed up their decision making. Bookrags characterizes it differently, “Treebeard picks the hobbits up and says that the ents roused themselves to action more quickly than he expected. They were very angry at Saruman’s treachery.” http://www.bookrags.com/notes/two/PART5.html