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BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU 175
triumphal secularism was hopelessly naïve and fundamentally unable to
combat the evils of collectivism. In fact, by criticizing collectivism without
the guidance of religion, Rand’s work verged into the very territory
of absolutism, Chambers maintained. He found Atlas Shrugged marked
by strong fascist elements and ultimately pointing to rule by a “technocratic
elite.” The review was marked by a strong personal animus. Rand’s
writing was “dictatorial” and had a tone of “overriding arrogance”; she
was not suffi ciently feminine, hinted Chambers, speculating that “children
probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.” 14 In a stunning
line, Chambers intoned, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,
a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas
chamber—go!’ ” 15 At base it was a clash of two radically different versions
of human nature. Rand’s novel showed mankind, guided by rationality
alone, achieving heroic deeds. Chambers, traumatized by Communism,
saw rational man as a damned and helpless creature trapped in dangerous
utopian fantasies of his own creation.
Chambers was also unsettled by Rand’s godless capitalism, which
might be even worse than godless Communism. Where Rand saw the free
market as an essentially spiritual realm and competition as the meaning
of life itself, Chambers saw only a heartless machine world. In the 1940s
Rand had been one of many intellectuals seeking a plausible grounding
for individual rights and democracy. By the 1950s conservatives
had found an answer in religion. Defi ning Communism as essentially
atheistic, they were able to frame Christianity and capitalism as natural
partners in the fi ght against government regulation. If the two impulses
were paradoxical or contradictory at base, that was the very point, for
conservatives wanted the free market set within an explicitly Christian
society. Only religion could balance the “materialism” of free enterprise,
with the Christian emphasis on charity, humility, and equality blunting
the harsher edges of laissez-faire. But now Rand appeared to be tacking
back to the earlier nineteenth-century vision of Darwinian capitalist
competition, absent the soothing balm of Christian egalitarianism.
Atlas Shrugged represented a fundamental challenge to the new conservative
synthesis, for it argued explicitly that a true morality of capitalism
would be diametrically opposed to Christianity. By spinning out
the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion Atlas Shrugged showcased
the paradox of defending free market capitalism while at the same
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