Positive Liberty

I have just returned from New York City, where I haven’t been since 1986, when as a boy of ten I watched the Statue of Liberty ceremonies. This time, I was speaking at Columbia University Law School, but I managed to get time to see much of the city, and I am so glad I did. New York worked its magic on me, and the trip was a powerful and invigorating experience.

I stayed at the Hudson Hotel, in a room the size of a complex hydrocarbon molecule (which is to stay it could have been smaller). I awoke to the sound of million-footed Manhattan descending to its pavements. I had seen Times Square and Rockefeller Center the night before, and I hoped to be able to see the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library before the speech. But the Library was closed, so I enjoyed looking in the fashionable windows on Fifth Avenue instead, feeling every bit the small-town hick arrived in the big city.

It was very foggy that day, so the top of the Empire State was hidden, and I could not even see it until I was only a block away. But then I was there, and the instant I entered the lobby, everything changed. The mural of the building in marble and chrome and bronze that gleams from behind the concierge, and the four-foot model of The Building beside her desk, were like signposts to a different world, and immediately, the gorgeous pride of Art Deco crowded in: every detail sculpted with the exact assertion of excellence. Around the hallway stood a frieze of medallions celebrating the ingenuity and labor that went into the construction of The Building—the masonry, the electricity, even the plumbing—shaped in bronze and chrome. The board listing the tenants went on and on, glowing on the wall in elegant self-confidence, like the signatures on the Declaration of Independence. The Empire State Building seemed to know that its greatness was an accomplished fact, like thunder—in need of no praise or even recognition, to know its own greatness. I walked away marveling at the simplicity of its shape and the audacity of its very existence. That audacity, of course, is its very essence—the very essence of sky scrapers—a quality now so closely associated with this structure that it is almost an abstract sculpture to the bold greatness of the free and reasoning mind.

Now on every side the beauty of New York seemed to jump out at me. The fleets of expertly driven taxis, the hushed enthusiasm of the pedestrians, the burbling diversity of languages and styles in every direction. The Atlas at Rockefeller Center, too busy with his task to notice the traffic and tourists; the diamond district seeming to struggle to withhold its enthusiasm. On every corner the buildings stood in dignified silence. The lesser ones, like the French Building, stood decked out in Art Deco metals and murals, as if dressed in their Sunday best, and honored to stand in the Empire State’s progress. Around a corner I came across the Chrysler Building, brazen and sharp, rushing skyward in chrome and balanced angles. I admired the winged gargoyle ornaments and entered the lobby, where its clock was labeled simply “Time,” and where the ceiling was decorated with an awesome mural of the manufacturing of the building. Men poured metal, and drove piles into the earth, all in rugged gloves and with determined and competent faces. The building itself could be seen rising above it all like the sun, heralded by a fleet of airplanes from around the world, and at the bottom, holding it all up, was Atlas.

Art deco is the great art of elegant industrialism. An adaptation of art nouveau for a world of manufacturing, energy, and prosperity, such as the world had never known before that time. It was a vocabulary of boldness, of a new age where engineering would liberate the energies of the mind; would conquer the earth anew through electricity and radio and air travel. It was the last art to speak of the Machine as humane, before it—and the architecture that celebrated it—were perverted by fascism and communism into the nightmare antithesis of humanity. It was the last architecture to shine—before the regimented, embarrassed grey shadows of Le Corbusier and Minimalism, and before anti-intellectuals like Diego Rivera turned the mural into an occasion for collectivist manifestoes. It was the perfect language for the American skyscraper—for a new world that had opened the gates to the mind of man.

Some people may find it hard to understand why I felt myself choking up in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. But New York’s skyscrapers are the closest thing we Objectivists have to cathedrals. They are monuments of human brilliance and skill; of man’s ability to embrace and transform—and in that sense, to transcend—the limits of the earth. In other nations, monuments were built in dark and shameful stone—at best as warnings or remonstrances against the will of those who might dare to stand tall. They were built by slaves for kings, as reminders of the world of death; as rejections of this world, of human happiness or the endless possibilities of existence. They were, so to speak, preemptive gravestones. But these monuments—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Grand Central Terminal, where I headed next—these grandest of all human constructions, are not ashamed to soar, to tell boldly of how far we can reach. They inspire, rather than warn; they challenge rather than threaten; they do not merely point to Heaven, instead they invite us up. And they stand untouched by slave labor, the product of no imperial command. They are the work of a proud, free, and independent people who agreed with each other to trade value for value in respect, and together chose to climb. I could not resist the feeling of joy, and a passage from The Fountainhead came to mind:

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York….

Grand Central was like a horizontal skyscraper, reaching not up but out to the world. Everywhere was life. The people streamed by, each to his own destination, watched over by time, which at that moment seemed their only limitation. Vendors stood attentive in light-flooded cubicles behind precisely ordered stacks of golden fruit and cool, sparkling glass. All around, people went about their business in a rush, not as a mass, but as a race of free men and women, pursuing happiness.

Of course, as I returned to the sidewalk, I could not avoid the dark thought of September 11th—of the reason why that Old Sentinel, the Empire State Building, had been forced from retirement to once more stand guard over the City. After my talk at Columbia, I went to the World Trade Center site, where a crowd of tourists stared at the hole where the greatest buildings ever built once stood. Beside the pit, One Liberty Plaza stands in dressed in a deep, almost vacuum black, like a mourner. My first thought was that it was all smaller than I had expected; the buildings seemed so huge that I somehow had imagined the hole would go on forever, till it reached the ocean.

September 11th began for me with a phone call that told me immediately something was wrong. Nobody should be calling at that hour; I would be leaving soon for school; I usually slept in on Tuesdays. I heard my cousin answer, and turn on the television. I came out in time to see the first tower already fallen from the sky. I will always remember one panting reporter talking to a fireman who was shrugging into his respirator. “What are you doing?” “I’m going to that other tower,” he said. “I think that other tower is going to collapse,” said the reporter, seeming to forget that he was on the air. “You would do the same for me,” the fireman said, and ran up the street. You would do the same for me. The rest? Well, the rest was the same for all of us.

If New York’s skyscrapers are like cathedrals, September 11th has even more significance. It was a statement about the values that we Objectivists hold dearest—a direct attack on the very engine of material success and progress: on capitalism, ingenuity, wealth, pride, and freedom. In these buildings, free men and women planned the future of the world in peace, in countless individual choices aimed at the pursuit of their own happiness. When the blow was struck, it came not from a bomb, or a bolt from some jealous god, but from primitive thugs who could not build airplanes and skyscrapers of their own, but could only seize these tools of peace and destroy them, to appease their own rapacious spite, their hatred of life, their blood-soaked dogma of eternal servitude. In September of 2001, I had frequent recurrence to the words of an old Freedom Song by Simon and Garfunkel: “You can burn down my churches, but I shall be free.” The words came back to me as I saw the graffiti on the walls by the construction site—dozens of little angular scratches, all saying things like “God bless America,” and “We shall not forget.”

I cried at the September 11 memorial, but I did not break down as I’d feared. The tattered artifacts and twisted metal, the photographs and names, were all so overwhelming that I seemed somehow beyond tears, able only to utter a few because I felt their inadequacy, the inadequacy of any gesture or words. We were invited to write our thoughts on cards that might be posted on the walls. I tried, though my hand was shaking so badly I doubt anyone can read it. My words were not enough. But I used a line from Atlas Shrugged, as best I could remember it. “What is the phrase that the vilest monsters in the world hate us for more than anything? ‘Business as usual’? Well, business as usual!” And on my way out, I singled out a poor, bewildered police officer to stammer a thank you and shake his hand.

I caught a cab for the airport, which followed the river as I had hoped, and soon I got to see the Brooklyn Bridge, another monument to ingenuity, with its cathedral windows opening to the living landscape of commerce. More than a century old, it seemed to reach beyond any moment, to something precious—like a rainbow with its treasure at each end. Its timelessness seemed to soothe me, to say that some day, all this, too, will be a cherished memory to some idealistic person who wonders about frontiers that we today do not even know exist. And then, beside me, in the barely clearing sky, emerged the silhouettes of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. In my sentimental mood, they seemed to say that, as long as we want them, they will remain on guard. I caught one last glimpse of them all as my plane left the city, and I thought of Howard Roark’s words to Gail Wynand, when the latter says that mankind will soon destroy itself. “Mankind will never destroy itself, Mr. Wynand. Nor should it think of itself as destroyed. Not so long as it does such things as this.” Roark is speaking here of the new skyscraper that Wynand has just commissioned him to build over the city.

The Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are now 70 years old. They must not remain the tallest buildings in New York. The proper monument to those who died here, and in Washington and Shanksville, would be to rebuild the World Trade Center exactly as it stood, rivet for rivet and bolt for bolt. But second best is the Freedom Tower, which will rise as a new generation’s commitment to the promise of America; as a declaration to the world that we shall not be moved—that we will not be afraid—that we will not take our eyes down from the sky.

I want to thank the Federalist Society and Columbia University for the opportunity to take this wonderful trip, and the many kind New Yorkers who made the experience so powerful and enjoyable.

Update: I don’t want to leave out my thanks to the American Constitution Society which also cohosted the speech. Their blog has a quick summary.

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