I have an account on Library Thing, a site that lets you catalog, tag and manage your books. I was browsing through my library and decided to take a look at my author cloud, which is basically a weighted list of all the authors you own books by (more books means the author's name looks bigger). A lot of the huge names were favorite childhood authors--Orson Scott Card, JK Rowling, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. But outside of that field, two of the biggest names were Derrick Jensen and Ayn Rand.
I cannot think of two people whose written works are more diametrically opposed. Derrick Jensen is an anti-civilization deep green activist who believes that we need to return to a level of technology and population closely resembling the Stone Age if we ever want to live sustainably on this planet. His books are incredibly lyrical, and link the pervasiveness of rape and child abuse in our society to deforestation, mining, climate change, imperialism and almost every other global problem you can think of. Reading Derrick brings you to your knees in tears because he shows you simultaneously how awful and abusive our culture is, and how beautiful the world is and can be if we have the courage to fight back.
And then there's Ayn Rand. Somewhat better known, Ayn's books are thick and pay homage to human genius in its many forms. Atlas Shrugged is her thousand-page ode to capitalism, an economic system which allows the brilliance of one man (say, someone who invents the lightbulb) to benefit the masses of humanity. The Fountainhead is her tribute to the individual going against the conventions of society and having the courage to be brilliant. And Anthem is a dystopian novel in an entirely collective world where one man and one woman rediscover human curiosity and the concept of self and run away together.
A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about Ayn Rand, as they should. Her no-altruism, no-government world leaves a lot of people out, and she's completely incapable of understanding and addressing concepts like privilege, racism, sexism, learning disabilities and the like. All of the sex scenes in her books are either outright rape or distinctly rape-esque. She is the right of American intellectual discourse, taken to its logical conclusions and stripped bare of any pretense.
And what Ayn is for the right, Derrick is for the left. Environmentalists get accused of being anti-capitalist, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-technology all the time. Most of them awkwardly backpedal and retract or soften statements they've made, trying to find some compromise between two fundamentally irroconcileable systems. Derrick doesn't lie and he doesn't compromise. He draws his lines clearly and picks a side. The living health of the planet is more important than economic growth and production. Production is just another name for turning living things into dead things, and civilization is sustained only by widespread violence. Come over to the side of the living planet, and fight like your life depends on it, because it does.
I'm drawn to both of these stories, both of these worldviews. Obviously, I'm more in the Derrick camp than the Ayn one. I'm an environmentalist. I'm not that into capitalism, our culture, or really civilization itself. I'd rather we spent most of out time growing our own food and making clothes ourselves. I'd like to keep the Internet and Western medicine, and I'm not sure where all that fits in. But I like where Derrick is going. I want to be there.
Even given this, Ayn isn't wrong about everything. At its core, much of her writing is about the beauty of human curiosity and innovation. This is the oldest cultural myth of Western civilization, and I'm aware that it's problematic. The lone man bravely staking out new ground gets to conveniently ignore the workers who make his lightbulbs and build his railroad and all that. And more to the point, because of inherent inequalities in the world, some of those railroad workers and lightbulb factory employees could probably find the cure for cancer or something equally important if they weren't trapped in an economic system where they have no other options for work and can't have agency in their own lives. But even with those problems, I find something incredibly inspiring about the heights that the human imagination has reached to. We've built a transcontinental railroad, gone to the moon, mapped the human genome and invented the Internet. I think a lot of that is built on collaboration, but there have definitely been people throughout history who had a vision, an incredible mind, and the resources to go with it.
The problem with these two worldviews is that they can't coexist. I think Derrick is right about what needs to happen. We need to un-grow, depopulate, re-learn to take care of ourselves and our landbases and live much more simply than we do now. But the curiosity that had fueled Ayn Rand's work is something fundamental to human nature. People want to understand how the world around them works. They want to make an impression or a discovery that will change the course of history. That desire might be rooted in Western cultural conditioning. But human curiosity is universal. And curiosity is going to push future humans, even if they're living in sustainable earth-dwellings, to wonder about us. It's going to push them to rediscover the technologies we came up with. It's going to push them to lightbulbs, cars and computers. It's going to push them towards machine-based technology.
Reading these two authors, I've had to come to terms with many false beliefs that I've held. Derrick has gotten me mostly past the idea that we can somehow technologically engineer ourselves out of the violence and environmental destruction that fuels our economic growth. But Ayn has also gotten me over the idea that we will ever go back to a place where we don't have that drive to discover and develop. No matter how bad peak oil is or what happens to the planet, people will still have that curiosity.
I don't know what to do with this realization. It doesn't speak well for the future of the planet, or ultimately the human race. And it makes it so hard for me to pick a side. I know, feel and understand that my health is ultimately dependent on the land the sustains me--clean water, breathable air, healthy soil, functional ecosystems. I've slept under the stars for months at a time. I know what it is to feel completely at peace, and the only times I've ever felt that way was when there was nothing separating me from the stars. But I'm still seduced by the terrifying beauty of industry. Walking through the sixth-largest coal plant in the country, I was awestruck by the scale of human imagination. I find factories haunting and poetic. When I see smokestacks, I think of the end of civilization, but they look so beautiful that I want to sit there, transfixed, and watch the apocalypse unfold.
I exist, day in and day out, praying that there will never be a moment when my life is on the line, when I truly have to choose between the two.
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