When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I was a wannabe hippie. Fresh out of college, I was a socialist, anti-industrialist, postmodernist, vegetarian who thought that human society was the pawn of advertising and big business. If there was an equation in my head, it was:
"natural = good. Human made = bad."
The irony of that thought being essentially a human creation never occurred to me, let alone how utterly ridiculous my self-righteous proclamations to this effect must have sounded out of my 22 year-old know-it-all mouth.
I had been taught, and had bought the "humanity as cancer" attitude that all the "enlightened" people I knew spewed or pretended to believe. Not that there is zero truth to these ideas, but I had ingested the overly-simplistic "everyone who disagrees is bourgeois/ignorant" version of the story.
In this sense, reading Atlas Shrugged had a profound effect on my sense of aesthetics and beauty. When I started reading it, machinery was a symbol for the ugliness of humanity, its disconnection from mother earth/gaia, the mechanization of the human soul. A sunset or a tree was beautiful. A sandblaster or a logging machine was ugly. There was no question about it. In fact, such a question was simply unthinkable. That is just the way it was.
As I read, however, I began to see the objects of human technology through the eyes of Ayn Rand's characters. Trains, tracks, signal lights, railroad ties, station platforms...these all became, not scars and blemishes, but embodied and concrete manifestations of human creativity and ingenuity. Steel mills, building girders, and paved roads became gifts from innovative minds, offered to me as a foundation and platform on which I could build my own vision of beauty. The tools of modern society, that I had taken for granted became living monuments that expressed the intelligence of hundreds and thousands of my fellow human beings, each of which offered their work in service of the thrival of everyone else. Society itself, in its unimaginable complexity became a tapestry of beauty and life, woven with the blood and brains of the human soul.
Now, I sometimes cry, not only at the beauty of a sunset, but also at a skyline, and even Spaghettios. Consciousness and creativity always expresses itself through content in a context. I thank Ayn Rand that she opened my mind to one of the most profound types of wonder in the world: the embodied human creativity we call technology.
Mark Michael Lewis
http://MoneyMissionMeaning.com
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