Making Philosophy Professors Obsolete

In For the New Intellectual, written in 1960, Ayn Rand calls for a new type of intellectual who will defend capitalism on moral grounds and thus finish the job started by the Founding Fathers: the establishment of a fully free, capitalist society. As already discussed, she showed that in a capitalist society, the culture gets its philosophical ideas from the university which gets them from the professional philosophers. However, in calling for a new type of intellectual, Ayn Rand clearly believed that other sources of philosophical ideas were valid; after all, she chose to first present her philosophy of Objectivism in the form of her novels: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

Now, 50 years since she wrote For the New Intellectual, we have even more avenues to learn philosophy thanks to the dramatic advancements in technology. This post will review those advancements and how they personally helped me to learn a philosophy for living on earth. The new sources are the following (dates are estimates of when the technology became popular):

• Television (1963)
• The internet, academia version (1986)
• Talk Radio (1987)
• "Big-Box" bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble (1997)
• Amazon.com (2001)
• Google (2004)
• YouTube (2005)
• Wikipedia (2006)
• Kindle (2007)
• Khan Academy? (2009)

In 1960, television was not yet a regular source of news and commentary like it is today. It wasn't until 1963 that a full half-hour news show was broadcast, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. However, as the new medium became more popular, Ayn Rand used it to promote her philosophy, appearing on popular shows such as Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue. I have found several good shows promoting free markets such as John Stossel's specials and Penn & Teller's B.S. And even when popular shows like Lost and Mad Men show the "bad guys" reading or discussing Ayn Rand, I believe the exposure only helps to spread good ideas even though that may not be the intent.

I first learned of Ayn Rand from the early internet. I was at the University of Illinois in 1993 and we had a Silicon Graphics workstation running Unix. In those days, which was before e-mail, you could "talk" to someone on another computer even if they were in a different city (which was amazing back then!). A former post-doc who had left Illinois logged onto the computer I was using and started a "talk" session with me (which was really just typing back and forth). We weren't good friends and I think we were both "talking" just to use the new internet technology. I mentioned that I was reading The Brothers Karamazov and bragged that it was 800 pages long. He wrote back that that was nothing--he had just finished Atlas Shrugged which was almost 1200 pages long! He didn't say it was a great book and that it changed his life (I don't think it did), just that it was really long! I asked him what it was about and he said something about being an ode to capitalism. That was enough to intrigue me so I decided to check it out after I'd finished The Brothers Karamazov. Later on, I also used the early internet to read and post to the Usenet group alt.philosophy.objectivism. I ended up not learning much from this free-for-all discussion of Objectivism, except perhaps to reinforce the fact that the best source of Ayn Rand's ideas is Ayn Rand herself. However, it was useful in that it raised a lot of questions which prompted me to look for answers.

It wasn't until 1987 that political talk radio took off because that was when the Reagan administration put an end to the Fairness Doctrine. Up until that point, radio shows were required to present "both sides of the argument," and this had the effect that no sides were presented. Rush Limbaugh is the most famous talk show host and he has, from time to time, discussed philosophical issues and has even read from articles by Robert Tracinski. But the most philosophical show has been The Leonard Peikoff Show which I was able to listen to for most of 1995 while I was at UCLA. One of my favorite shows was Is Perfection Possible?.

After I had heard about Atlas Shrugged, it was fortunate that the campus bookstore at the University of Illinois had a copy (next to a copy of Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand). This was before the "big-box" bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble were everywhere. I would later visit many of these book stores looking for more books by Ayn Rand and on philosophy in general. These large book stores, which had entire Philosophy sections, helped spread Ayn Rand's ideas by carrying not only Atlas Shrugged but also The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Philosophy: Who Needs It.

I just love amazon.com. No longer do we need to search multiple Borders or Barnes & Noble stores (or worse, used book stores!) trying to find the books we want only to be disappointed that they don't carry them. Almost any book we want to read can be ordered within minutes on amazon.com. It is unlikely that I would have found The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in a bricks-and-mortar store, but, as I can see when I search for it on amazon.com, I purchased this book from them on February 25, 2006. And I'm glad I read this book as discussed in this previous post. Another great thing about amazon.com are the reviews, for example this excellent critique from John McCaskey on The Logical Leap.

The ability to search the bulk of the world's knowledge and return results in less that a second is simply amazing. A Google search for "Ayn Rand" just now popped up "About 16,300,000 results (0.25 seconds)." The number five result was a news story entitled "Obamacare Makes Ayn Rand Look Prescient," an article I read because of the Google search. This is the beauty of Google. For people new to Ayn Rand, Google is an incredible resource to learn more about her and her philosophy. Perhaps they heard that Ayn Rand was part of the red scare in the fifties. They can type in "ayn rand mccarthyism" and the first link goes directly to a transcript of Ayn Rand's testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee from January 1945. Simply amazing!

For people who would rather watch videos than read a book (which is not me!), YouTube has lots of first-hand material from Ayn Rand. In addition to the Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue interviews linked to above, one can also easily find interviews with Mike Wallace, Tom Snyder and others. Surprising to me, there's even a video from an ethics class at Marist College teaching Ayn Rand's theory of egoism. I haven't used YouTube as much as the other technologies to learn about Ayn Rand's philosophy, but it's nice to see some of these old interviews.  And it is certainly a good opportunity to introduce people to Ayn Rand and her ideas.

I use Wikipedia all the time. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly unbiased and accurate for a free encyclopedia. Entries on Ayn Rand and Objectivism are pretty good considering how controversial she is. For someone new to Ayn Rand, it's nice to have a Bibliography of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and this was even useful to me, after studying her philosophy for 20 years, in that I found new information about her such as Memories of Ayn Rand by John Hospers, a philosophy professor at Brooklyn college and later at the University of Southern California. (Until one minute ago, I didn't know where he taught. But I found out from his Wikipedia page!) Wikipedia is a good place to start to get the basics and to get reasonably unbiased information on topics such as Libertarianism and the Objectivist Movement.

One of the reasons I love amazon.com is because they invented the Kindle. Is it an exaggeration to say that the Kindle and other e-readers are an invention as important as the Gutenberg printing press? Perhaps. But in terms of the ability to spread ideas easily, the Kindle is more powerful than the printing press. More than one million books are available on Kindle, and while it's not quite up to the Library of Congress (over 22 million books), it is constantly expanding. One of the great features of the Kindle is the "Send sample now" button where you can try out a book for free. I used this feature to skip over Human Action and to read George Reisman's Capitalism instead (as described here). It's wonderful that anyone with a Kindle (or just a computer) can download the sample of Atlas Shrugged or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and quickly judge for themselves if Ayn Rand has anything useful to say.

Khan Academy is a free, on-line education site with college-level lectures primarily on math and science. I believe on-line education is the future, and Khan Academy is a great start. They don't yet have a philosophy section, but that just means there's an opportunity for another person or organization to make their own on-line courses on a philosophy for living on earth. On-line universities also have the potential to teach people more about economics and what capitalism actually is. A misunderstanding of economics and capitalism is currently a problem with some Khan Academy lectures such as "When Capitalism is great and not-so-great." But Khan Academy has shown that on-line education is a viable option for education. On-line universities are probably the best chance we have to finally make the university philosophy professors obsolete (that is, until they start teaching something useful).

In 1960, Ayn Rand wrote in For the New Intellectual: "When the intellectuals rebelled against the 'commercialism' of a capitalist society, what they were specifically rebelling against was the open market of ideas, where feelings were not accepted and ideas were expected to demonstrate their validity, where the risks were great, injustices were possible and no protector existed but objective reality." Fifty years ago, the universities had a monopoly on philosophical ideas which is why most of the history of capitalism has been a "top-down" approach from the university professors down through many layers ultimately to the man in the street. But this is no longer the case. Today's honest, active mind has access to an incredible marketplace of ideas which is constantly expanding. The New Intellectuals of today should continue spreading the right ideas by all avenues available to them.