Ayn Rand and the Conquest of Space

3,644 words

This is the second part of the notes for a lecture entitled “The Conquest of Nature: Ayn Rand,” from October 1999. This was the seventh lecture of an eight-lecture course called “The Pursuit of Happiness,” delivered to my adult education group, The Invisible College, in Atlanta.

Ayn Rand wasn’t always an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Indeed, the early Ayn Rand was a Nietzschean with an aristocratic disdain for commercial society.[1] ^[2] But from her first writings to her last, Rand held that man was a heroic being and that the best expression of his heroism is the conquest of nature. In the About the Author note to Atlas Shrugged, Rand writes:

I have held the same philosophy I now hold, as far back as I can remember. I’ve learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications — and I intend to continue expanding it — but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.[2] ^[3]

Rand held that man’s three highest virtues are rationality, productiveness, and pride. For Rand, the core meaning of productiveness is the conquest of nature. Production is the use of reason, which “sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself”; it is “the road to man’s unlimited achievement”; its goal is “reshaping the earth in the image of his values.”[3] ^[4] The result of such achievement is self-esteem; the greater the achievement, the greater the self-glory. But heroic achievers don’t just glory in themselves. Others glory in their achievements, too. Hero-worship is another unifying thread of Rand’s thought from beginning to end.

Because of Rand’s deep commitment to hero-worship and man’s conquest of nature, she had high praise for America’s space program, even though it was a product of big government. Indeed, two of Rand’s best essays are about the meaning of the American space program: “Apollo 11,” about the mission and the immediate public reaction, and “Apollo and Dionysus,” which compares Apollo 11 to Woodstock.[4] ^[5]

Rand was invited to view the launch of Apollo 11, which took place on July 16, 1969. The invitation came from NASA, where somehow, someone understood that Ayn Rand would appreciate what they were doing. In “Apollo 11,” Rand uses all her skills as a novelist to communicate her experience of the event and her philosophical insights to convey its meaning. The essay is classic Rand: philosophical journalism of the highest order.

You’ll have to read the essay yourself for Rand’s description of the launch. I wish to focus only on how it affected her. After the liftoff, she writes:

I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph but more: the feeling that the white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.[5] ^[6]

Seven minutes after liftoff, the rocket disappeared from view, and the crowd of more than a million people began to disperse:

What did one feel afterward? An abnormal, tense overconcentration on the commonplace necessities of the immediate moment, such as stumbling over patches of rough gravel, running to find the appropriate guest bus. One had to overconcentrate, because one knew that one did not give a damn about anything, because one had no mind and no motivation left for any immediate action. How do you descend from a state of pure exaltation?

What we had seen in naked essentials — but in reality, not in a work of art — was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.[6] ^[7]

Man’s greatness is made concrete in the conquest of nature:

. . . For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel — not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!” — but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”[7] ^[8]

Moreover, the conquest of nature is the work of reason, science, technology:

no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being — an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality.[8] ^[9]

The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.[9] ^[10]

Throughout the essay, Rand misses no opportunity to exalt man over nature, sometimes to the point of tendentioiusness:

The Space Center is an enormous place that looks like an untouched wilderness cut, incongruously, by a net of clean, new, paved roads: stretches of wild, subtropical growth, an eagle’s nest in a dead tree, an alligator in a stagnant moat — and, scattered at random, in the distance, a few vertical shafts rising from the jungle, slender structures of a shape peculiar to the technology of space, which do not belong to the age of the jungle or even fully to ours.[10] ^[11]

In a deliberate swipe at nature lovers, Rand even describes litter as “wholesomely usual.”[11] ^[14]

Rand’s atheism is also on full display. Rand stayed in Titusville, the town housing most of the Space Center employees. Beyond Apollo 11 off in the distance, Rand “noticed only that Titusville had many churches, too many, and that they had incredible, modernistic forms,” perhaps because “here, on the doorstep of the future, religion felt out of place, and this was the way it was trying to be modern.”[12] ^[15]

When Neil Armstrong was about to set foot on the surface of the Moon, Rand shuddered at the thought that he would say something religious, as when the astronauts of Apollo 8 read the first ten verses of Genesis while orbiting the Moon. Such a gesture would “destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment.”[13] ^[16] But Armstrong “did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite.”[14] ^[17] He spoke instead of man: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Is it proper for the government to send men to the Moon? Rand’s answer is equivocal: “No, it is not — except insofar as the space program involves military aspects, in which case, and to that extent, it is not merely proper but mandatory.”[15] ^[18] Since pretty much everything NASA did had military implications, this is a green light for the space program, yet Rand agonizes a bit about what parts of the space program are capitalist or socialist, free or forced. Would she have such scruples about other defense programs?

Rand later remarks that “of all our government programs, the space program is the cleanest and best: it, at least, has brought the American citizens a return on their forced investment, it has worked for its money, it has earned its keep, which cannot be said about any other program of the government.”[16] ^[19]

Rand does, however, think there is a “shameful element” in the motive of the space program: “John F. Kennedy’s notion of a space competition between the United States and Soviet Russia.”[17] ^[20] Rand then sets up and knocks down an obvious strawman: that the space race is a gentlemanly competition, like the Olympics. “The notion of a competition between The United States and Soviet Russia in any field whatsoever is obscene: they are incommensurable entities, intellectually and morally.”[18] ^[21]

Yes, and because the US and USSR were intellectually and morally incommensurable, they had a little competition going: the Cold War, the stakes of which were the future of the planet. The space race was just part of the Cold War. The Cold War had two main elements: the arms race and a propaganda war in which both systems jockeyed for prestige, especially in the eyes of nations that were not yet aligned with either bloc.

The Soviet Sputnik satellite was a triumph in both the arms race and the propaganda war. When the Russians put Yuri Gagarin into orbit, John F. Kennedy was shocked into action. There was a meeting in the White House in which Kennedy asked for ways to one-up the Soviets. “Could we send a man to the Moon?” This is where the American space program came from. It was a race for technological superiority, and it was a race for prestige.

It is this latter element that Rand found most offensive. Frankly, since the Cold War was sufficient reason to launch the space program, it seems bizarre to complain that it was also prestigious. But Rand had a bee in her bonnet about prestige.

In an overly rhetorical and poorly-reasoned essay, “The Monument Builders,” Rand attributes “the most wasteful, useless, and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments”[19] ^[22] to the “desire for unearned greatness . . . expressed . . . by the foggy murk of the term ‘prestige.’”[20] ^[23] Rand, of course, chose “prestige” because it sounds stuffy and conventional. But she could have also used “honor” and “glory.”

Rand counted self-esteem among man’s three highest values and pride among his three highest virtues. So why was she allergic to “prestige” and its pursuit? The answer is simple. Rand’s idea of self-esteem and pride are based entirely on the individual’s relationship to reality. A man who masters reality feels self-esteem. A man’s pride drives him to further master reality. Other people don’t fundamentally enter into it.

To Rand, however, “prestige” had everything to do with our relations to other men. We enjoy prestige in their eyes. Thus, for Rand it is a form of “second-handedness.” Rand condemns monument-builders for seeking the unearned adulation of others. This, to Rand, constitutes fakery.

But we must be careful here.

First, what is wrong with wanting to impress other men by creating works of genuine value? Rand claimed that the goal of her writing was essentially autistic self-gratification, and it did not matter to her what the public thought.[21] ^[24] But this rings false. Rand did not write novels merely to tell the public what they wanted to hear. But when her best-seller Atlas Shrugged was badly received, Rand lapsed into years of depression. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be recognized for one’s achievements. It only becomes second-handedness when one abandons one’s own vision and standards to please the public.

Second, what about earned greatness, genuine achievement, true heroism? Do these not deserve memorialization? Why would a life-long hero-worshipper have an axe to grind against monuments to human glory? Why does Rand attribute the blackest motives to those who erect monuments?

The answer is twofold.

First, Rand is thinking only of Communism here. Thus, her discussion is entirely one-sided. She seems to realize this in mid-rant, when she pauses to discuss American monuments. But these are different, she says, because of their “modesty” and utilitarian origins.[22] ^[27] Frankly, this special pleading is laughable. The one example she gives, Independence Hall, was not built as a monument. She makes no mention of Mount Rushmore or the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials.

Second, Rand is ideologically committed to privatizing everything. There would literally be no public spaces in her capitalist utopia. She is especially concerned with privatizing self-worth. It should be based entirely on one’s relationship with reality, not to other men. Rand, like most modern philosophers, has no concept of what Plato and Aristotle called thumos, the part of the soul where honor and patriotism dwell. For Plato and Aristotle, thumos is the political part of the soul. But Rand would have disdained honor as “second-handedness” and patriotism as “collectivism.”

Rand’s commitment to individualism and laissez-faire capitalism requires her to deny the existence of collectives and collective goods: “Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals.”[23] ^[28] When individuals come together, things are possible that are not possible with individuals. But Rand holds that such collectives have no rights other than those of the individuals that compose them, and whatever goods they produce must ultimately be attributed to and distributed among individuals.

Rand claimed that the classical idea of the “common good” is simply “a meaningless concept, unless taken literally in which case its only possible meaning is the sum of the good of all the individual men involved.”[24] ^[29] When it comes to the social, the collective, and the common, Rand is a reductionist. Only individuals and individual goods are real.

Apollo 11 confronted Rand with concrete counter-examples to her individualism, which she more or less ignored or swatted away.

For instance, the Moon landing was made possible by a scientific and technological tradition going back to the ancient Greeks: “the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning in regard to the moon, but it was the last step, an end product, in regard to the earth — the end product of a long intellectual-scientific development.”[25] ^[30] Rand characterized this tradition as “an illustrious heritage” of which NASA’s scientists and engineers were “worthy recipients.”[26] ^[31]

We receive our scientific and cultural heritage as a gift. This is the meaning of “tradition”: a heritage is handed down and handed over, without payment. We do not “earn” it. We may expend effort to assimilate culture. We may pay teachers and textbook publishers. But how can we pay Aristotle and Archimedes and Mozart for their achievements?

What kind of goods are this “illustrious heritage”? Yes, behind each new idea is an individual mind. But there is something inescapably communal about ideas. If I share my money with others, I have less of it for myself. If I share ideas with others, I don’t have any less for myself. There’s something here that cannot be fully understood by Rand’s assertion that all goods ultimately belong to individuals. She brushes up against this fact, but then declares that such facts “do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.”[27] ^[32]

Honor, glory, and prestige are also like knowledge. Your glory is not diminished as more people share in it. In fact, it is magnified. This, too, cannot be comprehended by Rand’s philosophy.

But Apollo 11 was such a magnificent spectacle that it forced Rand to confront things she did not fully understand.

For instance, as Rand made her way to the launch site, she wrote about the experience of being caught up in an enormous collective movement, caught up in history:

No one asked any questions; there was a kind of tense solemnity about that journey, as if we were caught in the backwash of the enormous discipline of an enormous purpose and were now carried along on the power of an invisible authority.[28] ^[33]

In a passage worthy of Marcus Aurelius, she remarked on how the Apollo mission put everybody’s lives in perspective. It seemed silly to moan about “loneliness and ‘alienation’ and fear of entering an unknown cocktail party” while “three men were floating in a fragile capsule in the unknown darkness and loneliness of space.”[29] ^[34] Here the great advocate of self-esteem and enemy of laughing at oneself sees the therapeutic value of belittlement and mockery.

But Rand’s most interesting remarks are on the world’s response to Apollo 11, which she regarded as “a moment of truth”:

A great event is like an explosion that blasts off pretenses and brings the hidden out to the surface, be it diamonds or muck. The flight of Apollo 11 was “a moment of truth”: it revealed the abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities that has to be measured in terms of interplanetary distances. If the achievements of the physical sciences have to be watched through a telescope, the state of the humanities requires a microscope: there is no historical precedent for the smallness of stature and shabbiness of mind displayed by today’s intellectuals.[30] ^[35]

Apollo 11 also revealed a vast gulf between ordinary people and intellectuals, both in America and around the world.[31] ^[36] Ordinary people gain spiritual sustenance from heroism, because it demonstrates that success is possible:

In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it — the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential. Whatever his particular ability or goal, if a man is not to give up his struggle, he needs the reminder that success is possible; if he is not to regard the human species with fear or contempt or hatred, he needs the spiritual fuel of knowing that man the hero is possible.

This was the meaning and the unidentified motive of the millions of eager, smiling faces that looked up to the flight of Apollo 11 from all over the remnants and ruins of the civilized world.[32] ^[37]

In “Apollo and Dionysus,” she sums it up neatly: “It was the response of people starved for the sight of an achievement, for a vision of man the hero.”[33] ^[38]

Apollo 11 did not just cause millions of people to identify with the astronauts and those who made their flight possible. They also identified with one another. In short, Apollo 11 fostered community and goodwill. Rand writes in “Apollo and Dionysus”:

The best account of the nature of that general feeling was given to me by an intelligent young woman of my acquaintance she went to see the parade of the astronauts when they came to New York. For a few brief moments, she stood on a street corner and waved to them as they went by. “It was so wonderful,” she told me. “People didn’t want to leave after the parade had passed they just stood there talking about it — talking to strangers — smiling. It was so wonderful to feel, for once, that people aren’t vicious, that one doesn’t have to suspect them, that we have something good in common.”

This is the essence of a genuine feeling of human brotherhood: the brotherhood of values. This is the only authentic form of unity among men — and only values can achieve it.[34] ^[39]

Although Rand’s professed philosophy did not allow her to understand what she was seeing, Apollo 11 was her encounter with what the Ancient Greeks understood as the public realm, the realm of political life. It is a common space in which a community gathers to participate in goods that are magnified, not diminished, by sharing: knowledge, culture, and the glory of heroic achievements.

In contrast to the broad public, the reaction of mainstream intellectuals to Apollo 11 was largely scorn for reason, science, technology, and heroism. Despite paying lip service to “the public good” and “the people’s will,” “never have [the intellectuals] been so grossly indifferent to the people” [35] ^[40] and their genuine spiritual needs.

Rand was especially indignant about the calls to cancel the space program and to channel its funds — as well as the enthusiasm and unity evoked by Apollo 11 — into helping the poor. To Rand, this meant sacrificing human greatness to human mediocrity and worse: “Slums are not a substitute for the stars.”[36] ^[41]

Thus, at the end of “Apollo 11” Rand puts her cards on the table. She is not for big government, but if we are to have it, she would like it to promote human excellence in the form of science, technology, and exploration, rather than to coddle human mediocrity:

As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not need to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive. But if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon — or on Mars, or on Jupiter — will at least be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.[37] ^[42]

Ultimately, for Rand, man’s heroic conquest of nature is the most important thing. Why should Prometheus be chained by laissez-faire capitalism?

Notes

[1] ^[43] Greg Johnson, “Ayn Rand, Before Capitalism ^[44].”

[2] ^[45] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), About the Author.

[3] ^[46] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, paperback ed. (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 26.

[4] ^[47] Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: New American Library, 1988); “Apollo and Dionysus,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, second, revised ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975). Rand’s essay “Epitaph for a Culture,” on the cancellation of the Apollo program, is also reprinted in The Voice of Reason.

[5] ^[48] “Apollo 11,” p. 166.

[6] ^[49] “Apollo 11,” p. 166.

[7] ^[50] “Apollo 11,” p. 167.

[8] ^[51] “Apollo 11,” p. 167.

[9] ^[52] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.

[10] ^[53] “Apollo 11,” pp. 161–62.

[11] ^[54] “Apollo 11,” p. 162.

[12] ^[55] “Apollo 11,” p. 162.

[13] ^[56] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.

[14] ^[57] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.

[15] ^[58] “Apollo 11,” p. 169.

[16] ^[59] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.

[17] ^[60] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.

[18] ^[61] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.

[19] ^[62] “The Monument Builders,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 89.

[20] ^[63] “The Monument Builders,” p. 88.

[21] ^[64] Ayn Rand, “The Goal of My Writing,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, second, revised ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975).

[22] ^[65] “The Monument Builders,” p. 90.

[23] ^[66] “Collectivized ‘Rights,’” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 102.

[24] ^[67] “What Is Capitalism?”, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, paperback ed. (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 20.

[25] ^[68] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.

[26] ^[69] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.

[27] ^[70] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.

[28] ^[71] “Apollo 11,” p. 164.

[29] ^[72] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.

[30] ^[73] “Apollo 11,” p. 172.

[31] ^[74] “Apollo and Dionysus,” pp. 61 –64.

[32] ^[75] “Apollo 11,” pp. 171–72.

[33] ^[76] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 59.

[34] ^[77] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 60.

[35] ^[78] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 61.

[36] ^[79] “Apollo 11,” p. 175.

[37] ^[80] “Apollo 11,” pp. 177–78.