The Role of Ideas in History

Part one of Tracinski's What Went Right is titled The Collapse of the Collapse of Civilization.  It summarizes the big events of the twentieth century up until the eighties that demonstrated the world was falling apart:  the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Nazis and the Communists, and the counterculture rebellion of the sixties.  Tracinski then points out that things turned around in the eighties with the economic revival thanks to Reagan and Thatcher, the fall of communism and the spread of global capitalism, particularly to third world places like China and India.

He goes on to claim that Objectivist intellectuals have missed this trend and are still stuck in the mindset of the sixties and seventies:

For as long as I can remember, the typical final paragraph of any review of the state of the world by an Objectivist writer or speaker has gone something like this—which was aptly paraphrased in a recent note from a reader who had noticed the same pattern: "Western civilization as it exists today is doomed to destruction; I only hope I don't live to see its fall. Only then can a new future be built upon the philosophy of Objectivism."

This is the basic premise behind the What Went Right series, so it is worth examining where this idea came from, which is the main subject of this post.  Indeed, Tracinski explains that some readers claim he is not accurately depicting the views of Ayn Rand or other major Objectivist scholars:

One objection I have heard to the previous installments in this series is that the misinterpretation of the role of ideas in history that I am criticizing is merely a rationalistic error made by a few young Objectivists, but that it is not widely held by other Objectivists. Yet I have found that this erroneous view is pervasive, not usually as an explicitly stated idea, but as an implicit assumption.

In fact, the role of philosophical ideas in shaping history has been discussed by Ayn Rand in For the New Intellectual (1960) and by Leonard Peikoff in The Ominous Parallels (1982).  Although Rand died in 1982 and so did not witness any of the improvements Tracinski cites as "going right," Peikoff has continued to promote the idea, including the subtitle in his most recent book, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out (2012).

Ayn Rand stated very clearly her view on the role of ideas in history in For the New Intellectual:

Just as a man's actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society's existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas.  The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period.  The nineteenth century--with its political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the necessary conditions of material progress--was the result and the last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance.

And in the introduction to The Ominous Parallels, she says:

He [Peikoff] demonstrates that there is a science which has been all but obliterated in the modern world.  "Yet this science determines the destiny of nations and the course of history...," he writes.  "It is the science which had to be destroyed, if the catastrophes of our time were to become possible.  The science is philosophy."

Leonard Piekoff is also clear on the role of ideas in history in The Ominous Parallels:

By its nature, changing the course of a nation is a task that can be achieved only by men who deal with the field of ideas.  In the long run the people of a country have no alternative:  they end up following the lead of the intellectuals.

The intellectuals cannot escape ideas, either.  They may become anti-ideological skeptics, who offer the country for guidance only subjective feelings and short-range pragmatism;  but it is the ideas--ultimately, the basic ideas--they still accept, explicitly or otherwise, that determine the content of their feelings and of their pragmatism.  In the long run the intellectuals, too, have no alternative:  they end up following the lead of the philosophers.

The above quotes tell us that ideas from one generation influence the history of the next.  Because of this relationship, one would expect to be able to predict the future of a society by examining the ideas of its culture, it's dominant philosophy.  This is what Peikoff does in The Ominous Parallels:

No one can predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed.  No one can know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation's spirit and system of government.  No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly--or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a foreign war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs

What one can know is only this much:  the end result of the country's present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for many years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular.  The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.

If the political trend of the world remains unchanged, the same fate--collapse and ultimate dictatorship--is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously in process of decline or disintegration.  (The Communist countries and the so-called "third world" have long since fallen, or never arisen to anything.)  [...]

Most of the East is gone.  The West is going.

So Tracinski has correctly formulated the Objectivist view of the role of ideas in history.  He has also identified a common belief among Objectivists that America is doomed to collapse if we don't discovery Ayn Rand, a view that was made clear by Peikoff in The Ominous Parallels.

In the next post, I'll review Peikoff's views on how America can be saved and a primary difference between modern day America and pre-Nazi Germany.