It’s impossible to dissociate the boringly bland cinematic treatment of “Atlas Shrugged” from the droning, monothematic ideas that it purveys—the ideas, such as they are, of Ayn Rand. Like most fanatics, Rand begins with an unimpeachable kernel of thought—that the visionary inventions of geniuses are the crucial source of technological and social progress—and she elaborates it, with an attractively melodramatic imagination, into a vast, closed, quasi-paranoid edifice of oversimplified perfection. It’s this very oversimplification—the seemingly multifaceted structure that’s actually built of similar and easily identifiable forms, like a big rock-candy mountain—that accounts both for her enduring success and for her ready adoption by sub-op-ed ideologues.
Rand’s celebration of the individual and derision of the group is, among other things, a matter of nostalgia for a peculiar sort of inventor—the kind who, like the Lumière brothers or Georges Méliès when they developed the cinema, worked as conceptualizers, engineers, and craftsman. (In his forthcoming book “French Cinema,” Charles Drazin provides a good quick sketch of their blend of the artistic and the mechanical.) They had an idea, they understood the technology required to realize it, and they built their equipment with their own two hands.
Rand’s sense of the world is fundamentally anti-bureaucratic—but the kind of inventor whose work she celebrates is, essentially, the kind who is great at launching but not so good at perpetuating. Her contempt for organization extends, of course, to the corporation: she loves and venerates privately held firms and sees corporate structure, and its diffusion of authority to officers and directors, as a sort of institutionalized parasitism. She doesn’t think about the raising of capital, she doesn’t think about diversification, she doesn’t think about the extent to which the way of business is favored by, or even related to, government policy. She doesn’t think about truly complex social systems, and, above all, she doesn’t think about psychology and mixed or hidden motives.
I’m reminded doubly of this today by a piece in the Boston Globe by Leon Neyfakh, about a controversy in the field of evolutionary theory sparked by the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, over the theory of coöperation and altruistic, even self-sacrificing, behavior. As Neyfakh tells the story, Wilson was a key advocate, forty years ago, of “kin selection theory”—the notion that animals (including humans) learn to coöperate in order to increase the likelihood that their genes (as reflected in those of their blood relatives) will be passed along. Now Wilson believes that this theory is wrong, and that, instead,
the key … is the group: Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes—including the ones that predispose them to cooperation—are handed down to future generations.
For his troubles (and, in particular, for a paper on the subject, published in Nature, that he co-wrote with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita), Wilson was attacked by a hundred and thirty-seven scientists who claim he gets evolutionary theory wrong. I don’t know anything about evolutionary theory; that may be why I think Wilson is right. The mathematically based kin selection theory may work just fine for squirrels, but any theory of human behavior that fails (as it does) to take psychology into account is, by that fact, false. Humans coöperate, at least in large measure, for reasons that have to do with the increased size and imaginative capacity of the brain—not merely because of the desire to transmit genes mathematically (in ways that they’re not consciously calculating) but because of their own self-image as it relates to the group. Kinship may, at times, have something to do with it, but that would be a subset of the ways of coöperation. Groups often achieve what individuals can’t, and the readiness to identify oneself with a group, to take part in a group effort, and to subordinate one’s own immediate interests or desires to it is constitutive of humanity. Rand doesn’t get that; neither, apparently (for altogether different reasons) do many scientists.
This is meant in no way to diminish the importance or the greatness of the outlier genius, but, rather, to suggest that the difference between a failed genius and a successful one is often the ability to develop, by way of his or her great invention, an institutional structure, or group, that will sustain and extend the practical realization of a great vision. I’m reminded of “The Social Network,” which may be the most interesting business movie of recent years, in which Mark Zuckerberg learns a crucial lesson from Sean Parker (played exhilaratingly by Justin Timberlake) about the kind of expansion—and the structural changes it implies—that will protect “the Facebook” and help Zuckerberg realize it fully. Parker didn’t suggest that Zuckerberg make a present of his company to the government or bend his vision to the demands of lobbyists or editorialists, but that he face the fact that growth implies complexity, that the realization of a great idea is as much a social achievement as an intellectual one. It’s a lesson that Rand herself has no interest in; she depicts admirable companies as dictatorships. For that matter, it’s a lesson that the history of Hollywood itself teaches.
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