Review: The Case for Courage

Alright, I know Kevin Rudd is problematic. He’s the policy wonk who got ideas above his station in a way that even ending a decade of regressive Liberal government wasn’t enough to make up for. He was torn down by his supporters and then, as if to justify their action, did everything he could to destroy those who tore him down, even if it meant destroying his legacy at the same time.

We can only wonder how much better off we would be if Rudd had been the policy brains behind Julia Gillard’s political nous, but here we are. As he points out in this pamphlet though, first you have to win elections, and the fact remains Rudd is the only Labor leader to ever win a majority in the last quarter century. At some point, we have to face up to that fact and the reasons behind it.

So yes, Rudd is problematic but for all that, everyone should read this. It is effectively an alternative manifesto for the ALP and it’s one they should take very seriously. It contains many ideas both rusted-on Labor-right and the progressive left will find, well, courageous, but it’s hard to fault any of them. In fact, if Paul Keating had written this very document – as he well could have – all the Gen X Labor fanbois would be all over it, and rightly so.

There are plenty of potential Gotcha! moments. He calls out the bully boy tactics of the Murdoch media and proposes standing up to them in a way he completely neglected to do when in government. He returns to a pragmatically compassionate refugee intake – the one he threw out the window in 2013 for a chance at leading Labor to a third term. There is also no small amount of score-settling and told-you-so moments, from the early stimulus of the GFC to the NBN, and the truth is, he’s perfectly justified in doing so.

The contradictions are there for all to see but I encourage you to look beyond the chance to shout Aha! and judge the policies and tactics on their merits. Although it’s personal, not official, this is the most mature and forward-thinking policy document I’ve read since, well, since Kevin07.

I read Atlas Shrugged (and now you don’t have to)

I read Atlas Shrugged because it has had a significant influence on political thought in the 60 years since its publication, and I wanted to have an informed opinion on it. I’ll declare that I have little time or respect for the politics of those who cite Ayn Rand as an influence but for all I knew, it might just have been a good story that was hijacked or misinterpreted.

It’s not.

First, the good parts:
In its own way, Atlas Shrugged is an early feminist novel. The lead character is a woman who runs a highly successful national company, yet the fact she is a woman in such a position is hardly ever mentioned. Furthermore, she’s not ashamed of her sexuality or of using it to get what she wants. This was challenging stuff in the 1950s.

Also, the fact that Rand exalts the creators and producers above the mere paper-pushers is refreshing. It’s unfortunate that it quickly crosses the line between admiration and fetish.

The important thing to know about Atlas Shrugged is that it is not fiction, it’s fantasy. There is an important distinction. Regular fiction still takes place in the world as we know it, where the laws of physics, economics and human nature still apply. Atlas Shrugged does not take place in this world.

In order for her premise to make sense, Rand has created a world populated only by geniuses and idiots. Yet somehow, the idiots have managed to enslave the geniuses. Meanwhile, the geniuses all magically turn out to be of the same worldview and can easily find each other to have sex together. Importantly though, they can only enjoy the sex if they know for certain that their partner is doing it only for their own pleasure. Rand had a weird sub/dom thing going on.

And it is boring as batshit.

The book could be one third as long and still say everything it wants to say. The other 600 pages are padded out with interminable soliloquies that bash the reader over the head with Rand’s philosophy, and that’s not even counting the notorious Galt speech. It’s been suggested that this is how Rand chose to tell the story. I can only believe this if people are saying she made a conscious decision to write badly.

It could be considered innovative to present a socio-economic manifesto in the form of a novel – for that is essentially what Atlas Shrugged is – but the problem is that the author gets to write the counter argument as well. Rand is either in love with her characters or despises them, and it shows in the dialogue she gives them. She stops just barely short of labelling them “good guy” and “bad guy.” While some of the lead characters make it to a second dimension, the antagonists’ dialogue makes even a 60s-era Batman villain sound deep by comparison.

Take this line for example:

“Scientists know better than to believe in reason.”

To put such a statement in the mouth of a character who is supposed to be one of the nation’s top scientists, without any hint of irony or satire proves either,
a)    this novel takes place in some Bizarro World where ‘science’ and ‘reason’ mean whatever the author wants them to mean, or
b)    Rand doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Take your pick.

I have tried not to psychoanalyse the author, partly because many others already have, and partly because it’s tangential to the quality of the book. Still, it’s unavoidable in discussing the book as a whole. It’s clear that Rand does not believe her version of social Darwinism to be amoral. The piece of good left in her, Darth Vader-like, is that she recognises morality as a real thing which is to be aspired to and admired. So she attempts to flip the definition of morality – charity is evil; selfishness is a virtue; wealth is a measure of virtue.

She also addresses the problem mentioned earlier about fantasy versus fiction, stating on the about-the-author page:

“I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don’t exist. That this book has been written – and published – is my proof that they do.”

Seriously? Tolkien could have used to same logic to argue that hobbits are real.
If this is the standard of proof considered acceptable by her acolytes, it explains a lot.

At best, Atlas Shrugged is simply the longest and most boring straw man argument in history. At worst, it may have caused the global financial crisis of the late 00s.

Don’t believe me? Consider this: Alan Greenspan was chairman of the US Federal Reserve for nearly 20 years and he exerted a huge influence on financial systems in the late 20th century. He was also a Rand groupie who read the first drafts of Atlas Shrugged, and a champion of the laissez faire capitalism the book promotes. When asked what went wrong, he had to admit that he had never considered that people would behave so irrationally – which brings us back to the laws of human nature. I would like to ask if he has ever met people. Better still, I would like to put to him the question that John Galt puts to the country in his radio speech:

 

While fetishising industry and commerce, the speech also contains a passage that inadvertently contradicts Rand and her fans’ love affair with the rugged individual:

In other words, you didn’t build that.

I am not going to give Atlas Shrugged a one-star review, not because it deserves better but because every 1-star and 5-star review will understandably be assumed to have a political motive. The only way anyone could possibly regard this book as good writing is to be predisposed to Rand’s philosophy. Even if I were sympathetic to her worldview, I would be embarrassed that this is the best argument ever put for it. Having approached the book with an open mind, I can objectively advise that whatever commentaries you may have read tell you as much as you need to know.

Whatever damage has been done by those whose confirmation bias led them to believe that Atlas Shrugged has any basis in reality, Rand is correct in this one exchange on page 327:

Indeed they do!

The benefits of over-sharing

I have a confession that may surprise some people – even those who know me well:
I’m not a very good reader.

It’s not a literacy problem; I’ve just always been rather poor at reading books. Of course, I’m constantly reading ’blogs and columns, and magazine articles before that, but I’ve always needed a certain peace of mind to sit down and devour a complete book. Don’t ask me why. And due to my programming, it’s a peace of mind that comes all too rarely. As a result, my reading habits have traditionally been somewhat bulimic – I would binge for a month or so, and then read no books for sometimes years at a stretch.

In a crowded field, it’s something I’ve liked least about myself. I’ve always admired people who constantly have a book on the go and wanted to be like them – and I expect many of my friends assume I am – but I wasn’t.

That changed this year. It started when I took several books on holiday with me. It’s not unusual that I do this when I go away. What’s unusual is that this time I read almost all of them. I expected to slack off once I got home, but then I wanted to finish Mike Scott’s Adventures of a Waterboy before I saw The Waterboys in March. Realising I was in a binge-reading phase, I was determined to keep it going. Much to my surprise, I did.

I have read 32 books for the year. Now I must admit, a lot of them were short takes of less than a hundred pages, but by either titles or page count, that’s more than I’ve read in the previous ten years – in terms of books, anyway.

It’s not as if the peace of mind usually needed to sit down with a book was around this year. Indeed, it was conspicuous by its absence. For reasons not relevant to this topic, it has been a hellishly stressful year. This was also the year I did seek medical intervention for the aforementioned programming, but I was well into my binge by the time that started.

If I can credit one thing for giving me the reading habits I’ve always wanted, it’s Goodreads.

I first joined Goodreads years ago in order to keep up with my dearest’s reading.  She uses it mostly for keeping track of her own reading rather than to interact with others or brag, but let me tell you, she has plenty to brag about in terms of reading numbers. I gradually started adding books that I’d read. And then when I discovered the bar-code reading feature of the mobile app, I started adding all the books I had yet to read, and it made me somewhat ashamed. I started tracking my reading on Goodreads and added a few people I know from Twitter and Facebook, and now I get the feeling that friends will notice if I start slacking off – even though they probably pay no attention to my updates.

Oh dear! Social media again. Such narcissism!

Yes, I plead guilty to social media narcissism, but let’s also admit that we’re all narcissists in one way or another. If it weren’t for narcissism, we wouldn’t comb our hair or change our clothes either, so while I’m not suggesting that narcissism is any kind of virtue, it can be channelled for good.

I went to a little gallery ten years ago called the Museum of Particularly Bad Art, or something along those lines, and the proprietor said that its existence was testament to the fact that if you give voice to your dreams, then someone is going to make you follow them.

No-one in particular is making me follow my dream of being a better reader, but now I feel bad if I haven’t updated my reading progress a couple of times a week – and have something decent to show in those updates.

I haven’t connected my account to any other accounts – I’m not spamming my Facebook friends every time I finish a chapter, so by modern standards it’s not oversharing, but there are worse ways to overshare. So if there’s something you’re determined to do, try telling people about it. They don’t have to follow you, and maybe not many people will, but just the thought that someone may be watching can help you to finish what you started.

If you’re that way inclined, you can add me on Goodreads here.