Our Days are Numbered?

I am rereading Atlas Shrugged, the whole thing, after all. I had intended simply to analyze John Galt's very long speech, Rand's directed summary of her philosophy, against the concepts of environmentalism and sustainability. I have never disproved any major tenets of Objectivism, and yet I am now taking a course in which we are discussing the concepts of globalization, sustainability and justice, in a classroom of students who would for the most part want to lynch me if I took a pure Objectivist stance on our discussion topics. At least my committee chair read Atlas Shrugged in high school too, and did, at least then, consider herself an Objectivist. As far as I know, though, the majority of the department here is aligned more towards Marxism and socialism. It was safe enough and comfortable enough to keep Objectivism in the back of my head when I was in the sciences, because whatever my colleagues held as their governing philosophy, their actions tended to agree with the values espoused by Objectivism. In science, even if the 'truth' is elusive, we could all agree on the importance of honest research practices and reliance on data in forming theories.

Now, of course, I am in a department at the very heart of the debates that built up Objectivism. Political science is all about the role of government in private lives and in business, economic and social systems, and the construction of value sets and goals that drive policy. Every time I read Atlas Shrugged before this, these issues were outside my primary range of inquiry in my classes, and constituted simply the basis for a hobby interest outside science. This time, I am reading this book knowing that I am involved in discussions every day that touch on these same issues. Rand was certainly a pessimist, and ignored important roles emotion and intuition play in our evaluation of our goals and values, but much of this book remains solid, most in fact, despite these flaws in her philosophy overall.

In high school I wrote a paper on Atlas Shrugged, in which I looked up the historical parallels to Rand's characters and events in this book, Andrew Carnegie, J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and the Pullman Strike, among many others. I wrote then about whether her storyline was an impossibility for real life, and while I optimistically stated that our real world is more robust and not so far gone as her book world, I still find this book disturbing now. I had studied then the arguments against FDR's programs to fix the Great Depression, and wondered how much longer those fixes would hold, and while I am not exactly expecting the entire US system to crack and crumble tomorrow, I still wonder. Eddie Willers, in the start of this book, is pondering the phrase "Your days are numbered," with the vague feeling that it applies to something bigger than just the old typewriter to which it had been applied. This is the feeling I have had increasingly this semester, looking at the complex maze of fixes, and patches on fixes, that make up our global and national systems. We escaped the fate of Rand's fictional world, eradicating monopolies and enforcing socialist measures, so far without collapse. For how long?