Life and Value in
Ayn Rand's Ethics
 

Does this philosophical and scientific error have any substantive effect on Rand's view of the world? One way to examine this is to look at Rand's fiction, and in particular, at her example of an ideal society of just men and women, Galt's Gulch. What features of real human life does she consider it necessary to include in Galt's Gulch, and what does she feel free to omit?

Galt's Gulch has, to start with, a singular shortage of women. Ronald E. Merrill ingeniously suggests that Rand's mention of thirty-six specific individuals as residents of Galt's Gulch reflects, more than coincidentally, the Jewish legend of the tzaddikim, the thirty-six just men for whose sake God preserves the world. But of these thirty-six, the only women are Dagny Taggart, Kay Ludlow, an unnamed fishwife, and an unnamed mother who came to Galt's Gulch to practice her profession of motherhood. John Galt's teacher, William Hastings, went away to Galt's Gulch every summer for years, until he died, but he never told his wife where he was going, still less invited her to join him — though on Rand's stated views of sex and marriage he presumably loved her and she presumably shared his values. It looks very much as if the bar of virtue is set too high for most women; no more than one-ninth of the Just are female.

One of the more curious bits of Aristotelian biology is the principle that organisms are constituted by matter and form, and that form comes from the father and matter from the mother; that is, the human essence is male. As a result, the true human form is male, like that of the father. No normal, fully realized human being is female; women are the product of a failure to develop properly, a species of deformity, but one that fortunately can nurture the growth of a new generation of men. Rand does not endorse this outmoded embryological hypothesis, but her evaluation of human life seems to reflect a comparably low estimate of women, perhaps because she adheres to the same metabiology.

In a curious way, the population of Galt's Gulch resembles an army, a resemblance that becomes marked in the climactic chapter when virtually all of them fly to New York to rescue John Galt from his torturers. Like an army, they include few women in their numbers. And like an army, they are living and facing peril for the sake of a future victory against their enemies. But unlike an army, they seem to spend little time thinking about the women whom they will see when their battle is won; only Francisco d'Anconia and John Galt seem to have such dreams. And unlike an army, they are not standing "between their loved home and the war's desolation"; any women they care for are apparently being left outside, unprotected, amid the horror of a dying civilization. This doesn't suggest a strong concern with reproduction, or even with sex, for all the intense sex scenes.

Nor is reproduction a common activity in Galt's Gulch. Apparently there is only one woman there who practices the profession of motherhood, just as there is one man who grows tobacco, and one man who makes machinery.

This is perhaps a heavy load to place on Atlas Shrugged. It's an adventure novel, if one on a grand scale; its literary characteristics are those of pulp fiction. If it presents a band of hypercompetent men to whose number a few extraordinary women are admitted, this isn't very different from Doc Savage having his five male companions and his cousin Patricia join his adventure, or from the Second Stage Lensmen including four males of disparate species plus Clarrissa MacDougall. The pleasures of such fiction are their own justification. But adventure fiction isn't a complete image of human life. Of course not, Rand might say, it's a stylization, it includes the interesting and important and leaves out the dull and trivial — and it just happens that women are mostly trivial, that sexual love (except between titans) is mostly trivial, that reproduction is mostly trivial, and that the ideal man has no childhood or family background worth recounting.