Show Notes
Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand’s greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns’ biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts. We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That’s what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it’s not about earning money, it’s not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It’s about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they’re in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right? Also this. What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she’d despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they’re caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It’s a hard medicine. And. Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she’s perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it’s important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that’s it. Transcript Henry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello. Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you? Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this? Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, thoug
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Obviously, this is mostly about the literacy crisis, whether we understand it properly, whether it is happening in Spain, whether the PISA data supports James’ thesis, and so on. I began by asking James Marriott how things might work out for the best… OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like? MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change. We also talked about AI as a transmission of liberal democracy, a means of distributing James’ own work, and things like that. At the end, we had some fun about literary critics and Shakespeare which is much more civilized that arguing about the literacy crisis. MARRIOTT: Yes, I’m keen to read The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got it, actually. It came in my little set. OLIVER: I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, and then you can read Northrop Frye’s book about it. MARRIOTT: Yes. OLIVER: Which would be James Marriott–coded. MARRIOTT: Yes, good. I am very biased towards things that are James Marriott–coded. The Frye book I had in mind was A Natural Perspective. James is also going to read A.C. Bradley and we might record another podcast about that. Bradley being one of the greats. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to James Marriott. James is a Times columnist, a Substacker—he writes Cultural Capital—and he has a new book called The New Dark Ages. James, welcome. JAMES MARRIOTT: Thanks very much for having me. The Reading Crisis OLIVER: So the book is about the reading crisis and the risk it poses to liberal democracy. I want you to tell me, what is the most likely optimistic outcome? You might think that the odds of everything going well are very low, but if we do scrape through, what will it look like? MARRIOTT: That’s such a good question, and nobody has ever asked me that question before. Seeking optimism from me is a unique idea. I think the most likely optimistic outcome, as I think so often in history, is stagnation and more of the same, and things don’t change. And I guess I think there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic. I think societies have a remarkable capacity to go on stagnating or declining slowly and imperceptibly for a very long time, and often much longer than we think. I know that’s pretty tepid optimism. Probably in the general scheme of the sort of takes that I offer, that is quite optimistic. But yes, I always think that stagnation and drifting and can-kicking are underrated forces in history. OLIVER: Are we not going to stagnate at quite a high level? MARRIOTT: Yes. OLIVER: So is the pessimism sort of misplaced, in the sense that even a relatively bad outcome for us would be really quite good by the standards of human history? MARRIOTT: Yes, of course. Although, I mean, the standards of human history are an appallingly low bar. And I think any of us asked to try to eke out an existence in pre-industrial modernity would view that with more horror than a prison sentence or being sent to almost any country in the modern world. To live in a sort of pre-industrial, pre-democratic state would be pretty terrible, so that’s a low bar. That said, I think the main lesson from history is that—and I guess this is one of the points that is in the background of the book—is that we are living extraordinarily anomalous lives. To live in a literate and democratic culture is overwhelmingly not the norm through the entirety of human history. And I think sometimes humans have an extraordinary capacity for complacency, and the thing that comes back to me more and more, the more history I read, is how unusual and how fragile t
Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is. HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you— OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed. HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy. OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath. HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that. OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way. HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist. Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects. But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think. I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore. From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment. OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that. HENSHER: A lot. OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception. HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson. OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it. HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can. OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas. HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas. OLIVER: Yes. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz, and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front. Philip, hello. PHILIP HENSHER: Hel
What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSCRIPT HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter. We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome. ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here. OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love. HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time. First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it? HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.” So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato’s Timaeus, selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Gulliver’s Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter. So then we read Gulliver’s Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true. At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account. Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I’ve always loved the book for these reasons since then. I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John’s. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I’m not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It’s not zero, but it’s limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way tha
My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation. Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a way to succeed in their struggles against the vicious without adopting vicious means. In this episode, Oliver and I discussed Austen’s ideas of virtue, what that has to do with liberalism, the relationship between philosophy and literature more broadly, as well as poetry and ideas about the Great Books. We also talked about the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. Yes, we both liked it. Here is why Oliver thinks Jane Austen is so popular among philosophers. TRALDI: And so I do think that even though she’s not making arguments, she’s not laying out philosophical theories, there is a level of precision in her thinking about virtue, which I do think is something that it took me a little aback. And I think it’s part of why—one person who quote-tweeted my article was Daniel Kodsi, who’s a friend of our colleague John Maier and his coauthor often. And he runs this magazine called The Philosophers’ Magazine, which I had written before. And Daniel quote-tweeted my article with something like, “Add Oliver to the list of all the philosophers who love Austen.” OLIVER: And it’s a long list. TRALDI: And I think it’s a long list. And I do think this precision is part of it that she does, that it is—again, it’s not like a philosophy journal article, but it is an intellectual sophistication that is often not present in novelists that we really appreciate. And here is an extract about Austen, Smith, and the wonderfully fertile period at the end of the eighteen century. TRALDI: But yes, I think it’s obvious—without knowing the background, I’m sure there are scholarly questions about, how much Smith did Austen read? And they’re both 250th—a lot was happening in 1775 and 1776. OLIVER: Those were great years. Those were the good old days. TRALDI: They were great years. In the great books syllabus, you get to the end of the 1700s and suddenly there’s this—you have Smith, you have Kant, you have the American Revolution, you have the French Revolution, you have Burke. Rousseau is right before, Montesquieu is right before. I mean, it was a real— OLIVER: It’s a great time. TRALDI: It was a great time. A lot was being done. And obviously, you know, I love the 1800s. I love the Romantics. But you could teach a whole great books course from 1750 to 1800, probably. OLIVER: You’ve also got all the dictionaries and all that kind of work going on as well. It’s a very, very fertile—explorations. TRALDI: Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of—yes, it was an amazing time. OLIVER: So did you, having read these two, Austen and Smith, close together— TRALDI: Yes, and I should say that my reading of Austen was much more careful than my reading of Smith. OLIVER: Sure, but you wrote this before you read Smith. TRALDI: Yes, absolutely. OLIVER: Or at least you fully conceived it. Do you see a lot of Smith in Austen? TRALDI: “A lot” might be— This was my favourite bit. TRALDI: Yes. But this is one of the great—I know we talked about this, but it’s one of the great—you see this in Smith, you see this in Austen—commerce has its own virtues, and they are very traditional virtues. You have to be trustworthy. You have to be pleasant. You can’t really be wholly self-interested in every moment because people have to be willing to deal with you given your—I mean, think about Yelp reviews or even just word of mouth. “Oh, that person screwed me over.” OLIVER: There’s a discussion in one of Hayek’s papers, which is—it’s a very Smithian point he makes about, the nature of the knowledge problem means that it’s not so much that I’m trying to get information about the thing you’re trying to sell me, but
What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance. Laura, welcome. LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know. OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call. THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like. Christie’s Favorite Writers OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read? THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine— OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript? THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to. OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book? THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures. OLIVER: Yeah. THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way. OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets? THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. OLIVER: Yes. Yes. THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible. Christie and Shakespeare OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters. THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is? OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers. THOMPSON: That’s so interesting. OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him? THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that. OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don’t like and I do— THOMPSON: Go on. OLIVER: It’s called Murder Most Foul, isn’t it? THOMPSON: Yes. OLIVER: And there’s something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can’t walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right? THOMPSON: That’s really interesting. OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She’s not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think? THOMPSON: More rational, maybe. OLIVER: Much more rational. THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she’s not mad, Margaret, is she? But she’s upset. OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right? THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually— OLIVER: Waspish. THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way t