I’ve seen this train scene made fun of before. Well done on defending it. The point of the scene isn’t that the passengers deserved to be killed, but that their own ideas and choices led to their deaths. If a man does something really stupid like shooting heroine and then dies as a result, you wouldn’t say that he DESERVED to die, but you would say that he was responsible for his own death. This train scene is the same way. Reality doesn’t care what you do or do not deserve; reality just is, and when you try to go against it you will suffer the consequences.

I think you were studying in the wrong major in college

Hi Darren,

You write:
>Well, first I’d should say that I don’t think she meant that they were completely guilty and responsible; as if holding the ideas they had means that they deserve to die…What she more likely meant was that they were, to an extent, responsible for creating the situation where men like Chalmers had power — precisely because they played a part in creating it.

The Winston Tunnel scene is intended as a morality tale. If the fate of the passengers is just (by the standards of Objectivism) then it is not cruel, which is the position Peter Cresswelll takes. They are ultimately responsible, they get the ultimate punishment. Pretty straightforward. However, your interpretation differs in that you think Rand is trying to say that the passengers are only “to an extent” responsible for what happens to them. (I am not quite sure why PC thinks your interpretation supports of his view; AFAICS it does not).

The main problem with your interpretation is simply that there is nothing in the text to support it. Quite the reverse. Rand takes considerable authorial effort to spotlight the serious moral/philosophical errors of a selection of passengers, universalises these errors to every single person on train, then demonstrates their ultimate fatality by submitting the Comet to the merciless judgement of her (novelised) reality. To ram the point home, she even gives the doomed bearers-of-bad-premises a glimpse of true Objectivist moral illumination (Wyatt’s torch) before hurling them into the darkness. Her message is clearly that they are ultimately responsible, thus pay the ultimate penalty. If your point about partial responsibility was right, Rand’s supreme punishment simply outweighs the crime; therefore contra PC it is cruel.

This seems to me decisive enough, but we could go further. I suppose it’s possible that Rand might be making the more subtle point that, under the rule of mistaken philosophical premises and the unjust world that results, for many the punishment will indeed not fit the crime? Yet if this was her point, then we would expect to find evidence of this – some passages expressing a degree of compassion for the victims, some sense of their partial innocence before their fate. But there is nothing of the sort. Rand shows nothing but disdain and contempt for each of the passengers in her thumbnails of their psyches.

So all the evidence points in favour of the just-by-Objectivist-standards interpretation: that these are despicable people, guilty of all sorts of moral philosophical lapses such as collectivism, pragmatism etc getting their just desserts from that ultimate dispenser of justice, reality. And of course all this is consistent with Objectivist doctrine (which in itself is highly inconsistent, but never mind that for now).

Incidentally, I regard Rand’s moral system as very much mistaken, though its key errors are not hard to understand. So as a non-Objectivist I see the Winston Tunnel scene as both cruel and unjust.

FYI, here’s an interesting article we featured at our site last year that discusses the Winston Tunnel scene, and drills down into Atlas’ moral incoherency in general.

Darren:
>The right to one’s life is not dependent on one’s acceptance of Objectivism, and an Objectivist will be the first person to tell you this.

Now, this is not so clearcut as you might think – in fact it becomes something of a slippery slope. For example, Rand liked to claim that “the fate of human societies, of knowledge, of science, of progress, and of every human life” depends on having the correct epistemology i.e. adopting Objectivism. (ITOE, p3). In Objectivism, being fully rational means being an Objectivist; and being anything less than fully rational means you are less likely to survive, as of course man’s reason is his only distinctive tool for survival. In fact, the less Objectivist you are, it seems the less human you are (for example, as I recall she said Howard Roark was the only real human in The Fountainhead). All this of course also supports the just interpretation of Winston Tunnel scene above.

BTW Apologies for the lost italic tag above…;-)

No problem about the lost italic… I think I fixed it, it looked like the start and end tags were reversed. I’ll read the rest of your post and respond soon when I can.

Daniel,

Just a few things:

1.) When I say they are responsible “to an extent,” I’m saying that they are partially responsible for the tunnel accident. Their actions — such as advocating and voting for politics that put the incompetent workers in that situation — contributed to the wreck, but there were other factors involved (namely, the politics, the incompetent workers, and what they did).

2.) This chapter in the story is not a court trial; it’s a fictional story. Ayn Rand did not believe nor advocate that merely holding a bad idea means you deserve death or that your death, by whatever means it happens, is a good thing. The story is an example of how one’s actions have consequences, and in this case the consequences were dire.

I don’t think it’s fair to call her cruel for writing this story. Would you call the author of the Three Little Pigs “cruel” for writing the story? Or would you suggest that the author believed that people who build their house of straw deserve to die? Of course not.

3.) You say that there is nothing in the text to support my interpretation, but what about the rest of the book?

Hi Darren,
>1. When I say they are responsible “to an extent,” I’m saying that they are partially responsible… but there were other factors involved (namely, the politics, the incompetent workers, and what they did).

OK, I understand that, but I’m just trying to get clear on what you’re saying.

Let’s break it down so we can see the issue clearly:

1) If something is just, then it is not cruel. This is the opposition that long time Objectivist Peter Cresswell sets up in the post that he links to you, and it seems a reasonable way of putting it.

2) To be just, the punishment must fit the crime. To be cruel, it follows that the punishment must be excessive, more than the crime deserves.

The Tunnel scene is a work of fiction, but it is also intended as a moral lesson – hence why we are talking about whether it is “just” or whether it is “cruel” in the first place. Fictional or not, it seems to me you can’t have it both ways.

I would add however that Rand’s writing is highly skilled and very emotionally charged, and that this often confuses her defenders (and even herself) as to the real merits of her underlying arguments. Her style is designed to sweep you along, when you should be saying “Hey, just a second…” While I very much doubt I will change your mind, I would simply urge you to break it down yourself and think it through as clearly as you can, before coming to your own conclusions.

>Ayn Rand did not believe nor advocate that merely holding a bad idea means you deserve death or that your death, by whatever means it happens, is a good thing. The story is an example of how one’s actions have consequences, and in this case the consequences were dire.

Likewise here. As it happens I think you are mistaken, as I think you are mistaken in your “partial responsibility” interpretation above. Rand was a totalist and an absolutist, at least rhetorically. I happen to think that the one of consequences of Objectivist doctrine turns out to be that if you hold a premise contrary to Objectivism, this is ultimately fatal and further more this fatality is what you deserve. I have already cited at least three important examples of this, and there are many more. Without going into it in too much depth here, this consequence, which I think follows logically from some of Rand’s premises, accounts for the distinctly apocalyptic turn in Objectivist culture in general and in Rand’s writing in particular.

>Would you call the author of the Three Little Pigs “cruel” for writing the story?

But this is just my point: the wolf gets exactly what he deserved, as do all the piggies. The punishments fit the moral errors, so there is no problem here. The question you must ask yourself is: Is this the case in the Tunnel Scene?

Daniel,

From what I understand, you are treating this story as a case of “punishment” as if Ayn Rand picked out a handful of people and then killed them because they had bad ideas. Then from that you say that Objectivism and/or Ayn Rand holds that death is an appropriate punishment for holding the wrong ideas. I think I’ve made my case, so for now I’ll just say that I disagree with your “cruel” versus “just” argument setup.

But when it comes to the Three Little Pigs, you said that the “punishments fit the moral errors.” The pig was eaten by the wolf because he was lazy and built his house of straw. How is that just?

I just asked my wife, who is a first-grade teacher, and she said that there are different versions of the story. I remember the pigs getting eaten after the wolf blew their house down, but in another version the pigs just run to the next house.

Darren:
>From what I understand, you are treating this story as a case of “punishment” as if Ayn Rand picked out a handful of people and then killed them because they had bad ideas. Then from that you say that Objectivism and/or Ayn Rand holds that death is an appropriate punishment for holding the wrong ideas.

Right, except I don’t come to that conclusion from that story. You get to that conclusion logically from some of the key premises of Objectivism, Rand’s writings – for example the Tunnel scene, or the quote from the ITOE that I mentioned – are by and large consistent with that conclusion.

Anyway, as I said, I hardly can hope to persuade you of my point of view in an internet comment. All I can do is encourage you to treat her like any other writer or thinker and make sure the product beneath the compelling stylistic packaging really works as advertised.

kind regards
Daniel

PS Your wife’s version of the story was the one I was referring to.

Hmmm, dropping a lot of html tags today…;-) The close italics should be after the “from”. Thanks!

Interesting discussion.

I just re-read Atlas last summer.
I do not think Rand was at all “gleeful” in her telling of the train story, nor was she “gleeful” at the destruction of the world that is chronicled in the novel.

That last line–that Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth is actually a very sad statement. They saw it, and did not understand what it meant–that their choices were the cause of the “draining of the brains” in the world, and it was the loss of those brains that made the disaster of the train wreck inevitable.

I think the story points to the reality that there are no “innocent” bystanders among adults in the world. And the opposite of innocent in this sense is not guilt, but the inability to make moral choices at a fundamental level. (A person who is a child, or who is mentally retarded or who is insane is innocent in this sense). But the people on the train were not innocent. This does not make them guilty of actually choosing to make that particular disaster happen.

The adults on that train were complicit in creating the circumstances that led directly to that train wreck, but they were not directly responsible for it. Just as the Germans who were silent in the face of the mass murders they knew were happening near their towns were complicit in the murder, although they were not directly responsible.

I think Rand is saying that there are no innocent bystanders aboard the train except the children mentioned at one point. All of the rest had the ability to make moral choices, but chose not to make them.

Oops. I left out one important thing: those who were silent in the face of the destruction around them, thus becoming complicit, were unable to see the reality before them: that the world they had allowed to be made was dangerous to their lives. They could not allow themselves to see it because if they chose to think about it, they would have had to make a stand. Thus, their choice to not think about the consequences of the decisions made on their behalf made them unable to protect themselves. This is different than John Galt’s deliberate choice to go back to New York in order to win Dagny Taggart. He faced the reality of the dangers and could thus act to prevent them.

This novel is a morality play on the highest level; in this kind of story each word and each event of the story is chosen to convey the moral point. Nothing is in the story by accident. This is not realism–it is justice.

Thank you Elisheva for your comments, great points added!

In response to Elisheva,

I don’t know what the reasons were for Germans not stopping the holocaust. Maybe they didn’t know about it. Maybe they did know about it and feared to stop, maybe some even approved. We’re still hunting down nazi warm criminals to this day. We’re still hunting down those directly responsible. Following one line of reasoning that has presented here in relation to the train, justice in this world would be served by tracking down all people (presuming they were of age, not children, not retarded, etc) alive in Germany at the time and doing the same to them as we do to the direct perpetrators.

Is that right? So if we were ordering the death penalty for Nazi war criminals, then ordinary complicit people should be executed also. That is equivalent to what happened in this train story. If you genuinely feel that ordinary Germans should face the same punishment then I can’t argue with that. We’ve clearly got very different views on morality.

Another thing I found odd, the attempt to justify murder by claiming the people were going to die anyways. So why not just let them die? Or in a real life case, SAVE THEM. You’ll never see it used as a valid defense in a court of law that someone comes across someone who had just been in a car accident and shot them. The judge would ask why and the guy would say, well I asked and the injured guy said he was a socialist. He didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain (the shock?) but I thought I’d shoot him just in case. You never know, he might have been right that he could go fast enough through the tunnel and no one would have died.

I’m with Daniel here. You can say that Rand was not “at fault” for the deaths of the citizens; she is merely reporting on what happened to them. Objectively.

She’s not, though. As the author, she’s caricatured that beliefs of her perceived enemies, and attributed these caricatures to a very broad swath of humanity, and then she invents the consequences from her imagination. This is exactly how you demonize an “out group” — by including a little bit of what appears to be recognizable truth and then making a straw man out of it, predicting dire consequences.

You’re an atheist, right? When I object to the doctrine of hell, Christians like to absolve their god of any responsibility, claiming that God doesn’t MAKE people go to hell — he tries to warn them away from the hell to which they will inevitably go when they refuse to shape up. There’s a big flaw with this argument though: their doctrine indicates that the god CREATED the hell to put them in. The “rescue” is from a consequence that he (they say) made up.

I see the train wreck chapter as similar. Rand is the author and takes a massive amount of creative license. She invented the people. She fleshed out their beliefs (intended to represent those she disagrees with, but largely failing). She invented the train situation, and she kills them.

Finally, you offered an interesting explanation for the current economic crisis:
“Just look at things like Social Security, Medicare, the bailouts, deficit spending, or our coming-soon government health care system. These are all things that everybody knows won’t work and can’t work, but nobody’s willing to be the messenger with the bad news.”

What’s remarkable about your claim is that the party which has been thoroughly in control of all branches of government for the great majority of the last eight years is the one that describes their position as anti-government (a la Reagan with his “most terrifying words” speech). There has been deregulation at every opportunity, and a lot of slackening of the laws and oversight which had previously restricted business in the housing and financial sector, and this is widely seen as the cause of the current market woes. It takes a lot of gall to claim that it happened because too much government meddling.

Russell,

Instead of repeating what I’ve said before, I’ll offer an example.

Let’s pretend that a man, Mr. Q. A. Author, decides to write a book about the dangers of smoking after seeing multiple family members die of lung cancer. But instead of writing another anti-smoking book filled with boring statistics and nasty pictures, he decides to write a fictional story that’s somewhat based on his life. His book has a gripping plot that shows multiple characters, all of whom are smokers, deal with the effects of their poor decisions. By the end of the book, they all die due to their smoking habit.

Now imagine someone reading this book and saying, “OH NO! Mr. Q. A. Author is saying that he thinks smokers should die! Just for smoking? He couldn’t have let even one smoker live? What glee he must have taken to write about the deaths of the smokers! He used his creative license to create characters just to kill them off! How horrible!”

That’s essentially the argument that I’m hearing against this chapter in Atlas Shrugged. Just like the author above wrote about the consequences of smoking, Ayn Rand wrote about the consequences that BAD philosophy can have on your life. I think you’re missing a lot by focusing on how the author stated his or her point instead of what the point actually was.

As for my galling statement about government meddling in the economy and who is responsible, I think you have to look at what the politicians actually did instead of what they said they’d do. Republicans do talk a big free-market game, but when they had power they increased the size of government fast enough to make even a Democrat envious. Despite whatever “deregulation” you say they did, there was still a *ton* of regulation in the economy, and it pushed us to this point.